A social-cognitive analysis of a female-focused hackathon

Abstract

Hackathons are thematic events of short duration that focus on the development of software prototypes. These events normally last from one to three days and they are increasingly popular. However, the interest of women in these events is still low. This paper aims to investigate, from a social-cognitive perspective, how experiences of more inclusive hackathon formats affect interest in hackathons themselves. We adopted autoethnography to systematize the first author's experience as a team participant in a female-focused hackathon. The results suggest that event formats can affect participants’ self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations and goals. These beliefs may influence perceptions of their potential performance on the team, confidence in their own skills in the technology and perceptions of opportunities in the technology market. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and Professional Topics → Women • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing. ACM Reference format: Luciana A. Almeida and Cleidson R. B. de Souza. 2022. A social-cognitive analysis of a female-focused hackathon. In GE@ICSE'22: Third Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering Proceedings. ACM, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3524501.3527597