Ara Shirinian: LA Hacks should work to increase female representation

If there’s one word I want you to remember after reading this column, it’s disruption.

In the technology industry, disruption is a way of life, a lust for innovation, a need for something better. With it, you thrive, and without it, you wither.

For the last three days, more than 1400 students occupied the court in Pauley Pavilion with disruption as their mantra, competing against one another with only 36 hours to build the best new application in a yearly event called LA Hacks.

Of these participants, only 21 percent were women. This gender discrepancy is unacceptable.

The organizers of LA Hacks should work to improve gender diversity in future years by first increasing the representation of women in sponsorship roles, and also giving priority enrollment to female applicants for the event.

Out of the 25 core organizers of LA Hacks, all of whom are UCLA students, only six are women.

In light of this, it shouldn’t be surprising that only four out of the 29 people who spoke at the opening ceremony were women; during the almost two-hour long presentation, they occupied the stage for just 11 minutes.

We cannot expect more women to suddenly want to become a part of coding culture when they are so poorly represented. Unless more proactive measures are taken, there is little hope for increased diversity in the future.

Everything the hackers do at the event is in an effort to impress the sponsors, who collectively give out thousands of dollars worth of prizes. But more important than that, the sponsors represent the future possibilities for those interested in computer science. If the representatives from these companies have a better gender distribution, women will be much more likely to want to pursue careers in the field.

The first step should be to involve sponsors in the effort. Many of the sponsoring companies, like Microsoft, are actively attempting to change the lack of diversity in their companies by updating their hiring practices and trying to create more open environments. It wouldn’t be a stretch for the organizers of LA Hacks to request that all sponsors bring more women to represent them in the opening ceremony, judging pool and as student mentors. They could even offer prizes specific to projects that deal with racial or gender inequality.

The next critical step should be to include more women among the core organizational members in charge of LA Hacks. This is a simple but effective way to ensure that the event favors everyone equally, and that diversity stays a lasting priority.

Those changes are sure to result in a natural increase in the number of female participants in the event. But more immediate measures should also be taken to kick-start progress.

This is why future LA Hacks events should give priority admission to women.

For this event, there were 4000 applicants, 1500 of which were randomly selected by lottery to participate.

While a 50 percent gender breakdown does not have to be mandatory, a modest preference in the lottery for female applicants can help bring the number up to a more reasonable level.

Since the applications are not chosen based on merit, there should be no concern about participants being less qualified if the priority admission policy is put in place.

In fact, it’s likely that the exact opposite would be true. A diverse group of people will always bring to the table a broad range of ideas. Last September, Katherine W. Phillips, Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics and senior vice dean at Columbia Business School, published a feature in Scientific American explaining that studies about diversity in workplaces all point to the same conclusion: diverse workplaces are more innovative.

And in the technology industry, innovation is everything.

For an industry obsessed with the cutting edge and constant disruption, it’s surprising that its social constructs are so backward. Technology is so prevalent that the people creating it are shaping our lives in an intimate way. Everyone uses technology, so everyone needs to be a part of designing it.

LA Hacks is an enormous event that presents a lot of opportunities for students to turn their ideas into realities.

While the motivation to innovate is great, when all it gets us is thinner phones with more applications, there doesn’t seem to be much of a point. Just like a company, we as a society need to constantly rethink the way we work in order to thrive.

Disrupting the legacy of inequality in the technology industry is long overdue. LA Hacks has an opportunity to break the mold and lead the charge for a more diverse future in technology. It would be a shame to let that go to waste.