Gender-Specific Hackathons

• Gender-specific hackathons are events organized with homogeneously composed underrepresented gender teams to promote supportive, identity-affirming innovation.
• These events feature structured role rotations, dedicated mentorship, and engaging workshops to enhance technical skills and collaborative dynamics.
• Project themes focus on health, sustainability, and AI, incorporating user-centered design and measurable engagement to drive practical outcomes.

A gender-specific hackathon (GS) is a hackathon event in which participant teams are intentionally composed with homogeneity in an underrepresented gender category, such as all-female or female/non-binary lineups. This model is explicitly structured to cultivate a collaborative, low-pressure, and identity-affirming environment, in contrast to regular institutional (RI) hackathons which typically emphasize competition, rapid output, and career networking. The GS format has become prominent in technology sector initiatives focused on diversity, equity, and pedagogical inclusion, but its principles have now been incorporated into hybrid hackathon frameworks that seek to optimize both collaboration and outcome-driven project delivery (Tisha et al., 23 Dec 2025).

1. Structural Characteristics of Gender-Specific Hackathons

GS hackathons are defined by several systematic features:

• Team Composition: Homogeneous in underrepresented genders, typically composed of all-female or female/non-binary teams.
• Atmosphere: Prioritizes collaborative, low-pressure settings and offers strong community-building elements, often through identity-affirming activities such as karaoke or dance games.
• Mentorship: Dedicated mentor assignment per team (predominantly women), with frequent, scheduled check-ins facilitating structured guidance and rapid feedback loops.
• Workshops and Events: Provide skill-based sessions ranging from beginner to advanced, incorporating playful social activities to sustain participant engagement.
• Project Themes: Centered on health and well-being, personal finance, and productivity, leveraging user-centered design and community learning.
• Strengths and Weaknesses: Delivers high comfort, peer learning, and support for novice risk-taking, but often features less defined deadlines and subdued competitive drive, occasionally resulting in unfinished deliverables (Tisha et al., 23 Dec 2025).

In contrast, regular institutional hackathons typically permit self-selected teams (often with a 3:1 male:female ratio), outcome-driven and competitive atmospheres, on-demand mentorship without formal team assignment, and a focus on technical advancement or entertainment projects.

2. Team Dynamics, Role Rotation, and Mentorship in GS

GS hackathons implement deliberate scaffolding of team roles and mentorship. Roles such as Team Lead, Tech Architect, UX Lead, Data Analyst, and Quality Advocate are distributed across members and rotated every six hours to stimulate skill acquisition and support dynamic team interactions.

Each team is provided with two mentors—one technical expert and one soft-skills-oriented coach—trained in inclusive facilitation techniques and micro-teaching. Additional peer-mentoring pods group multiple teams with a shared mentor, promoting cross-team knowledge exchange and broadening networking across identity boundaries.

Role rotation and mentorship frameworks are designed to maximize soft-skill development (creativity, communication, collaborative problem-solving), consistent with experiential learning models and components of Self-Determination Theory (SDT): autonomy (self-directed work), competence (challenge calibration), and relatedness (mentor-supported team affiliation) (Araújo et al., 11 Feb 2025).

3. Project Selection and Learning Objectives

Curated tracks in GS hackathons typically align with the strengths observed in collaborative, female/non-binary teams: Health & Well-Being, Sustainable Systems, AI-Powered Assistants, and Open Innovation (participant-defined topics).

Associated learning objectives are task-specific:

• Health track: Emphasizes user-centered design and data privacy.
• Sustainability: Involves IoT integration and optimization algorithms.
• AI: Engages prompt engineering and model evaluation.
• Open Innovation: Focuses on creative problem framing and lean methodologies.

Deliverables are consistent across tracks: user story maps, prototype demos, and written reflections on teamwork, role rotation, and learning gains (Tisha et al., 23 Dec 2025).

4. Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation Metrics

Evaluation in GS hackathons requires a multi-dimensional approach:

• Hybrid engagement score:

$H(C, I) = \alpha C + \beta I$

where $C \in [0,1]$ is normalized competitive drive (e.g., ratio of bonus innovation tokens earned), $I \in [0,1]$ is normalized collaborative support (e.g., average peer-support survey rating), $\alpha, \beta > 0$ are weighting coefficients ($\alpha + \beta = 1$).

• Sample parameterization: Balanced ($\alpha=0.5$, $\beta=0.5$) versus inclusion-leaning ($\alpha=0.4$, $\beta=0.6$).
• Statistical measures: Team engagement (Likert survey of “felt supported” vs. “felt pressured”), satisfaction index (0–100 scale), project impact (number of features implemented, user-testing NPS), reliability of qualitative coding ($k=0.86$, Cohen's kappa).
• Self-assessment (example): In one hybrid SE hackathon, 85.7% of respondents rated creativity and innovation stimulation at 6 or 7 out of 7, and 86.1% reported high collaboration and teamwork, although only 47.1% rated practical knowledge application at high levels—suggesting domain-specific variance among novices and first-years (Araújo et al., 11 Feb 2025).

5. Implementation Guidelines and Resource Requirements

Successful gender-specific or hybrid hackathons mandate logistics tailored to inclusivity and collaboration:

• Venue: Large central auditorium with breakout rooms for focused team work.
• Infrastructure: High-speed Wi-Fi, power stations, prototyping kits, and physical or virtual tools (Discord, Slack, GitHub).
• Mentor pool: Two trained mentors per team, plus a pod mentor for every three teams.
• Event scheduling: Periodic pulse-check surveys, time-boxed mentor rounds, structured ice-breakers that blend GS-style community building and RI-style networking.
• Evaluation protocols: Pre-/post-event surveys, observational coding using frameworks such as SLT, artifact analysis via topic modeling and lexicon analysis, and longitudinal follow-up at three months for collaborative persistence.
• Budgeting: Regular provision for food/snacks, mentor stipends, awards, and event swag (Tisha et al., 23 Dec 2025).

6. Limitations, Boundary Conditions, and Future Research

Practical boundaries include institutional scale (small colleges may lack rooms and mentor resources), cultural context (competition weightings may require calibration), and resource disparities (hybrid GS/RI models are more complex than single-format events).

Structural limitations such as over-specified role rotations may impede deep technical focus in specialized teams, while excessive scaffolding can suppress spontaneous creativity.

Suggested future research involves:

1. Calibration of competition vs. collaboration via empirical A/B testing.
2. Automated team-formation algorithms utilizing frameworks such as BERTopic with HDBSCAN clustering.
3. Integration of virtual participation pathways to broaden access and inclusivity.
4. Longitudinal tracking of career impact via alumni surveys (Tisha et al., 23 Dec 2025).

A plausible implication is that gender-specific hackathon principles, when integrated into broader hybrid hackathon design, can optimize both personal growth and project deliverable quality for participants across a diversity of backgrounds.