Why Your Hackathon Team Needs Women to Win

Last month my team won 1st place and $5000 at a hackathon with 'Hot Guard', which was also chosen by DevPost as “Staff Pick”. Our secret sauce: gender diversity. While hackathons can still be intimidating for many women, teams that bring on female hackers are literally winning more. These teams are seeing benefits in developing more nuanced ideas, reaching larger markets, and better managing internal communication -- and it's not just talk.

After a year of hackathons, my track record includes 8 wins, or 100% of the hackathons in which I've participated. The wins have brought more than just thrills: $11,000 in cash prizes, 3 months of incubation by Edmunds.com, recognition from Unilever, and even a very tempting job proposal from Condé Nast in eCommerce. How this happened wasn't luck but may also not be obvious, so I'm going to share the secret of the why and how any typical brogrammer team needs to get more women on their team and ship better products.

Bizarrely, even when I go to hackathons now, I encounter weird baises. All-male teams may take a glance at me and quickly judge that women can't really code - they can only design or market, and they definitely can't lead the team in product or the demo. It's clear in the body language, the looks they swap among themselves, and the overheard whispers. Think it's just you and me? Couldn't be further from the truth: just read ‘why don’t more women go to hackathons?’

Women Hustle and Hack with the Best of Them

It’s worth noting that Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba -- which had the biggest IPO ever at a $230 billion valuation -- said this at Alibaba’s first-ever Global Conference on Women and Entrepreneurship in Hangzhou, China:

I feel proud that more than 34% of senior management are women. They really make this company’s yin and yang balanced. Women balance the logic and the instinct. I would say this is the ‘secret sauce’ of the company. Men think about themselves more; women think about others more.

The natural female ability to "think about others more" means women instinctively think through use cases and product experiences before a single line of code is written. That means they can potentially  save the hackathon team a weekend of building the wrong things. That's exactly what happened in my CapitalOne hackathon team. A male engineer had drawn up the user flow for a complicated data science product and no one challenged his ideas except me. I sketched a wireframe with two views: one showing a map of nearby food trucks, and the other showing a cashflow graph for the food truck. Alongside, a single button to get things done. 

A teammate laughed and said with ease, "Twain just made our product sexy! Let’s do that instead."

Later, when two more engineers joined the team, the product’s simplicity made their coding easier. This is especially important because of the time constraints at a hackathon: the team may simply not have enough engineers to code something complex. The result: our team won the $5000 prize with a simple, polished product, all a result of great communication.

Admittedly, I’ve been coding since I was a pre-teen, like many of my historically best teammates. Computer science is becoming a compulsory subject in high school - and it was one of my best classes during my teen years. Add a math degree, and I am confident alongside any programmer, male or female. This won't be the case of every female hacker -- but the coding skills I used in the CapitalOne hackathon weren't the most important factor. It was the skill of understanding our user, our product, and facilitating clear communication about these observations to our team that did the trick -- and here's where any woman will shine. Knowing where you're going counts for as much as how you get there when it comes to winning hackathons.

How to Build a Balanced, Bias-Free Team

So what’s the best way of attracting women to your hackathon team and increasing your chances of winning? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Proactively pitch the women who show up at a hackathon. Their insights and feedback may save the team 48 hours of pointless coding.

2. Listen with patience rather than being dismissive. A small amount of patience on your part can lead to a stronger team and a bigger, better product.

3. Be mindful of difference in work styles. Men and women work differently, as goes for introverts and extroverts. That difference can be the grit that forms a pearl.

4. Give women a substantial part of the hack to solve. Not just the PR, the mockup, or the pitch -- really spend time pair programming and sharing notes to accelerate mutual learning and problem-solving.

5. Let women do their part of the demo pitch. It shows the judges your product is, genuinely, an example of teamwork. Subtle positive impressions can affect judges’ votes.

That last part I know because I was a judge at Droidcon 2012.


So, hopefully, there’ll be much stronger hackathon teams and better products because of this post. When everyone reduces their biases, collaboration becomes a lot more productive and fun for us all. Go on, do something different from brogramming.  Go out there and give women the chance to help you win hackathons!