Hackathons and digital feminism in Tbilisi, Georgia

Published on March 20, 2014

TbilisiLifestyle

This week, an event claim­ing to be the biggest col­lege Hackathon in all of Eu­rope took place in a most un­ex­pected lo­ca­tion, Tbil­isi, Geor­gia. Or­ga­nized by a non-profit or­ga­ni­za­tion called Uni Hack, and spon­sored by a va­ri­ety of Geor­gian banks and soft­ware com­pa­nies, the event brought to­gether over 500 stu­dents from a va­ri­ety of Geor­gian Uni­ver­si­ties, fu­ture pro­gram­mers, de­vel­op­ers, de­sign­ers, and en­gi­neers. Sev­eral IT stu­dents from Geor­gia (the coun­try), who were iron­i­cally at­tend­ing Geor­gia Tech Uni­ver­sity in the US state of Geor­gia, de­cided to launch Uni Hack in De­cem­ber 2013 a repli­ca­tion of the hackathons they had at­tended in the United States.

The event was a huge suc­cess. The Tbil­isi-based Cau­ca­sus School of Tech­nol­ogy pro­vided the space and the stu­dents took care of the rest. Now, barely three months later, the sec­ond edi­tion of the hackathon counts on the sup­port of eight im­por­tant spon­sors and of­fers up to 10,000 GEL (4,000 Euros) in prizes; not a small sum for the cash strapped Cau­casian coun­try. But de­spite the ob­vi­ous ben­e­fits that the cre­ativ­ity and in­no­va­tion of a hackathon brings to the coun­try, the event also helps to show­case an alarm­ing trend: the ma­jor­ity of the hackathon par­tic­i­pants were male. Only one of the fifty teams par­tic­i­pat­ing con­sisted en­tirely of women, and none of the ten speak­ers were fe­male. 

Around the world, women are grossly un­der­rep­re­sented in tech­no­log­i­cal fields, and highly de­vel­oped coun­tries are no ex­cep­tion.  While women hold 57% of jobs across the United States, only 25% of po­si­tions in com­put­ing oc­cu­pa­tions are held by women. Log­i­cally, the same trend can be found in in­sti­tutes of higher ed­u­ca­tion, where women re­ceive only 14% of com­puter sci­ence de­grees at major re­search uni­ver­si­ties. In­cred­i­bly, how­ever, this num­ber has fallen in re­cent years. In 1985, 37% of un­der­grad­u­ate de­gree re­cip­i­ents in com­puter sci­ence were women. By 2010, that per­cent­age had fallen to 18%. In the United King­dom, the sit­u­a­tion is even worse. While women make up 49% of the labour mar­ket, they com­prise only 17% of IT and tele­com pro­fes­sion­als.  

In Geor­gia, the dif­fi­cul­ties faced by women who want to enter the tech in­dus­try are even direr. The coun­try is plagued by poverty and only 30% of women claim to be em­ployed, as tra­di­tional gen­der roles main­tain that a woman’s re­spon­si­bil­ity is first and fore­most to her chil­dren and fam­ily. But Jump­Start-Geor­gia, a non-profit or­ga­ni­za­tion that uses tech­nol­ogy to com­mu­ni­cate com­plex in­for­ma­tion in a way that is en­gag­ing and easy to un­der­stand, is break­ing these trends as the first tech NGO in the coun­try to em­ploy over 50% women.

Com­bin­ing the skills of pro­gram­mers, front-end de­sign­ers, and data jour­nal­ists, Jump­Start cre­ated the web­site feradi.​info where a va­ri­ety of in­fo­graph­ics and in­ter­ac­tive on­line tools vi­su­al­ize large data sets that are use­ful to cit­i­zens but are usu­ally too com­plex or dis­or­ga­nized for the gen­eral pub­lic to con­sume. When the or­ga­ni­za­tion launched in 2009, like most tech-based or­ga­ni­za­tions, the ma­jor­ity of its em­ploy­ees were male. But over time sev­eral fe­male de­sign­ers, data jour­nal­ists, ad­min­is­tra­tive as­sis­tants, and pro­ject man­agers joined the team, and even­tu­ally the gen­der bal­ance tipped in their favour.

Now, sev­eral of the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s mem­bers have agreed to vol­un­teer their Sun­day af­ter­noons to share their pas­sion for tech­nol­ogy with more Geor­gian women. Launch­ing a Tbil­isi-based ver­sion of Girls Who Code  -a New York-based non-profit or­ga­ni­za­tion that teaches com­puter pro­gram­ing to young girls in order to ad­dress the gen­der dis­par­i­ties ex­is­tent in tech­no­log­i­cal fields – Jump­Start’s staff now works di­rectly with a group of around ten fe­male pro­fes­sion­als be­tween the ages of 22-35 to ad­dress these is­sues in Geor­gia. The women, most of whom are jour­nal­ists, re­searchers, and ac­tivists, bring their own lap­tops to Jump­Start’s of­fice each week to learn to code with Ruby.

A hackathon at New York Code for Good Chal­lenge

"As many peo­ple do, I thought cod­ing was the do­main of math and sci­ence geeks and be­yond the com­pre­hen­sion of mere so­cial sci­en­tists like me. But then I joined Jump­Start’s Girls that Code ini­tia­tive and re­al­ized that there is no magic in­volved! There is, how­ever, a lot to learn about how to struc­ture your path from a prob­lem to a so­lu­tion through a lan­guage that only com­put­ers "speak". And that knowl­edge comes in handy in vir­tu­ally every field you could pos­si­bly think of. In my case, these skills will allow me to help keep the gov­ern­ment trans­par­ent, open, and ac­count­able,” says Tamara Sar­ta­nia, a young pro­fes­sional work­ing for the Na­tional De­mo­c­ra­tic In­sti­tute in Geor­gia and a Girls Who Code en­thu­si­ast.

Tamara and Jump­Start ap­pear to have touched on a re­al­ity lost to many. Com­puter pro­gram­ming goes far be­yond the do­main of build­ing web­sites or get­ting a good job in a com­pany like Google. It is also a vital skill for ide­al­ists in coun­tries where open data is still scarce and where in­for­ma­tion is es­sen­tial if one is to un­der­stand so­ci­ety and work to im­prove it.