International Women’s Day Hackathon CaseStudy

HackerEarth successfully conducted a women only online hackathon on international women’s day, to encourage and celebrate women in tech. This Hackathon attracted over 10,000 women programmers from over 35 different countries, who built over 2000 applications, in a span of 3 days.

Why a women only Hackathon?

Women representation in the technology industry is at a 23 year low. Since 1983, when the distribution was almost equal, it has come down to 27%, as of 2015. The percentage of women programmers is even lesser - an abysmal 19%. This is particularly worrisome, as a lot of the foundational work in the early days of computer programming were women. However owing to multiple socio-economic reasons, there has been a gradual decrease in the representation of women in tech.

HackerEarth is one of the largest community of programmers in the world and the gender distribution was similar in our community too. This had to change and we wanted to do our part. Women in tech need to be encouraged and celebrated. Budding women in tech need more role models to look up to. To even these odds, HackerEarth conducted a women only Hackathon.

The Support

HackerEarth’s initiative was well received by everyone we approached. The International Women’s Day Hackathon was backed by some of the biggest names in the tech industry. The support was led by Snapdeal and @WalmartLabs, followed by Harman, Altimetrik, ThoughtWorks, Akamai, SanDisk, Capillary, HCL, AT&T, Freshdesk, Persistent, Vmware and Practo.

The initiative was also backed by some of the largest programming com-munities and media outlets in the world. 10000 Startups, Mozilla, Ban-galore JS, Apache CloudStack, BlrDroid, FollowHer, Scrollback, Map-plinks and Business Standard, all extended their support to the event.

The Hackathon should bring to-gether as many women program-mers as possible to participate in the hackathon.

It should be large enough to make budding women programmers from all parts of the world take notice.

It should be backed by major stake-holders in the tech ecosystem to add credibility to the initiative.

It should produce useful products, which can serve as a showcase that women are not inferior to their op-posite gender with respect to coding skills.

The Objective

HackerEarth

Outreach and promotions

The basic ingredients of the Hackathon was ready - there were set themes (productivity, social welfare, fun/gamification and retail), it was backed by top companies and communities. There was a strong moral and material incentive to take part in the challenge; Along with coding for eradicating gender bias, Apple products were up for grabs - Macbook Air, iPad Air and iPhone 6 for the top 3 participants. The next challenge lay in promotion of the event.

The Result

Theme Wise Submissions

Total No of Participants

Total No ofSubmissions

Individual Participation

TeamParticipation

8130 1747

7366 746

72

28

SOCIAL WELFARE

PRODUCTIVITY

38% 32%

67

33

TOTAL NO OF REGISTRATIONS

10,126

WEB

MOBILE

78

22

FUN/GAMIFICATION

MULTI CHANNELRETAIL

13% 17%

82

18

WEB

MOBILE

A comprehensive marketing plan was laid out and executed for promoting the women Hackathon. The efforts were as follows -

Targeted Facebook and Google Ads to women programmers

Targeted Internal and community mailers to women pro-grammers

PR outreach to all major publications

Internal company mailers to all women programmers by sponsoring companies

College outreach through partnering institutes of HackerEarth

Content marketing push

Social media outreach from HackerEarth properties

In event promotions - Twitter promotions

Offline outreach - Radio ads and billboards

Organic Facebook, Google plus and twitter outreach to women groups and influencers

Years of Experience

0 YEARS1105

3- 5 YEARS

1 - 3 YEARS

5+ YEARS

India - 85% I US - 9% I Others* - 3%

46%

29%

12%

14%

946

2339

3740

Countrywise Submissions

33

PARTICIPANT SELFIESDURING THE HACKATHON

Post event engagement

The results of the Hackathon were announced 4 weeks after the com-pletion of the Hackathon. 2000 submissions were evaluated and ranked based on usability, design, impact of the solution and concept.

Top 30 winners were invited to an offline conference in Bangalore to attend 5 hours of keynotes and panel discussions addressing the prob-lems faced by women in tech and solutions to encourage more women to take up tech skills and jobs.

The Impact

With this Hackathon, HackerEarth has pulled off a world record with respect to participation. It was wide spread and even garnered partici-pations from countries like Iran and Fiji Islands. Over 2000 working ap-plications were built over a span of 3 days.

HackerEarth will further engage with the winners of this Hackathon in various activities through the course of the year to serve as encourage-ment and role models for other women in tech. We will leverage the success of this hackathon, until the next year, for the second edition of the International Women’s Day Hackathon.

WOMEN LOVE CODING