Got rejected by several hackathons. Once I was rejected but my friend (similar college, same previous hackathon experience, significantly less experienced than me but is a girl) was accepted. And I just got a summer intern from a well-known tech company a week ago.
The actual objective of the hackathon is (probably) oriented around the group more so than the individuals. College applications work exactly the same way – top schools could fill their classes with 2400 SAT, 4.0 GPA, Porsche-driving philanthropist-of-the-year white or Asian males year after year. But frankly, that school would suck.
A better approach would be to focus on the group. Metrics like: how enjoyable the hackathon was, what cool people did you meet, what did you learn from fellow hackers, and ultimately: how many quality submissions were created. This is ignoring any explicit goals of increasing diversity/inclusion in the field, which is a fairly common theme for hackathons.
One can rightly argue that increasing the diversity of their participants falls well in line with their entire purpose of existing. Even if they're single mindedly optimizing for quality submissions, it's not absurd to hypothesize that more diverse groups create more creative solutions.
It's making a decision on overall group performance, with individuals' culture/gender/age/school/languages/years experience/company background being a proxy for their impact in group performance.
If increasing diversity wasn't an implicit or explicit goal of virtually every hackathon ever, I'd agree with you.
