7000 Women, Mostly From India and US Create a World Record for Hackathon ahead of Women’s Day

7000 Women get together to create a new Coding world record for HACKATHON ahead of Women’s Day tomorrow

They got together for a hackathon and in the process ended up creating a world record for women’s hackathon. This has a special meaning because tomorrow, 8th March is being celebrated as Women’s Day all over the world.

Exactly 7134 women participants, majority of them of India and United States got together for a three-day coding marathon organized by Bengaluru-based coding platform HackerEarth that began on Friday.

“We want to catalyse a change that encourages more women to take up technology. An IDC report found that only 18% of the 5 million developers in India were women.We want to bridge this gender gap,” said Vivek Prakash, co-founder and CTO of Hacker Earth.

Out of the 7134 women participants, nearly 80 percent were from India, 12 percent for the United States and the rest from 34 countries around the world including UK, New Zealand, Chile, and Iraq.

The code fest which was a online event was so organised as to end on International Women’s Day on March 8th. Participants in the code fest had to build software products under any of three themes — productivity, social and gamification.

The women programmers are from companies including Walmart Labs, Altimetrik, ThoughtWorks, Snapdeal, Akamai, SanDisk, Harman, Capillary, HCL, AT&T, Freshdesk, VMware and Practo. Some of these companies, as also IT industry association Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups initiative, are backing the event.

“Writing great code can be fun for everyone.Women might feel intimidated because they do not get to see many other women in the industry .While this is unfortunate, it is surmountable.Which is why we are very happy to be a part of HackerEarth’s women’s hackathon,” said Kaushik Ghosh, head of people at ThoughtWorks India.

And wait it is not over yet, so a fresh record may be created by the time it ends tomorrow.

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