A hackathon that bats for women’s empowerment

“We wanted to start a platform that would recognise women in the tech space and open up more avenues for them. This will be an ongoing process and the first step towards that is by holding this hackathon and breaking stereotypes,” said product engineer Gayathri Sachidanandam, who organised the event along with Sankari Sivagurunathan, Charanya Rengarajan and Divya Ganesan. 

Though the idea was to shed more light on the role of women in tech, the project also batted for gender diversity. 

“So, we also let men be included in the team – as long as they had a woman as the leader, and that the number of women outnumbered men. We had college students and professionals from all over south India attend to ideate, brainstorm and prototype. It was a really enriching experience,” explained Gayathri. 

The event was judged by Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of Mad Street Den; Dorai Thodla, an entrepreneur, mentor and teacher; Kalpana Desigan, Head of Market Intelligence at Freshworks, and KP Saravanan, co-founder and CTO, Chargebee. The theme was simple – ‘Solutions and ideas that solve everyday problems in business’ with sub-themes such as Productivity, Collaboration, and Content Management. 

“After a day and a half, all the teams got to present a demo of their products after which the winners were chosen. The feedback we got was excellent, and encouraged us all the more so to keep this project ongoing with future events,” the team at Chargebee concluded.