We’ve been running AI and Cybersecurity education events across Europe for the past few years. Here’s what we've noticed: the people who show up to mixed AI hackathons are about 75-80% male. The people who stay quiet during Q&A sessions are disproportionately women. The people who apologize before asking questions are almost always women. And the people who say "I'm not technical enough for this" before they've even tried? You can guess.
This isn't about capability. It's about visibility, prior exposure, and the confidence gap that research keeps confirming exists in technical spaces. A 2018 GitHub study found that women's code contributions were accepted more often than men's—but only when their gender wasn't identifiable. When it was visible, acceptance rates dropped. The issue isn't competence. It's the environment in which that competence gets expressed.
The Problem With Mixed Spaces (Even Well-Intentioned Ones)
Mixed-gender AI events don't create a level playing field by default. Here's why: Voice distribution is skewed. In workshops with 30% women, men still dominate 70-80% of verbal participation. It’s not malicious — it’s momentum. Once a pattern establishes itself (the first five questions come from men, the loudest voice in a team is male), it becomes self-reinforcing.
Beginner questions get gendered. Women are more likely to feel they’re "holding everyone back" by asking foundational questions, even in beginner-labeled events.
Men tend to ask those same questions with less self-consciousness. The result? Women stay stuck longer.
Team formation favors existing networks. At open hackathons, teams often form from prior connections—university classmates, coworkers, friends. Women, who are underrepresented in CS programs and tech roles (22% of AI professionals, per recent data), have smaller networks to draw from.
Impostor syndrome compounds in isolation.
When you’re one of three women in a room of 40 developers, every mistake feels like evidence that you don’t belong. When you’re in a room of 40 women, a mistake is just... a mistake.
None of this means mixed events are bad. They’re the end goal. But they often unintentionally reproduce the gaps they’re trying to close.
Women-Only Hackathons Aren’t Safe Spaces—They're Learning Labs
Let us be clear about what Women4Vibecoding Europe is and isn’t.
It’s not: A support group. A networking lounge. A confidence-building retreat with minimal technical content.
It is an intensive, 8-hour AI prototyping sprint where participants build functional tools from scratch—most with no prior coding experience. Participants leave with working demos, not just slides.
The format is women-only because it removes the friction that slows learning:
No one's monitoring whether they're "technical enough" to be there
Asking "stupid questions" becomes normalized (spoiler: there are no stupid questions in AI tooling—everyone's figuring this out in real time)
Team formation is based on interest and complementary skills, not pre-existing hierarchies
Mistakes become shared debugging sessions, not reputation risks
Isabel Buganu, who founded Women4Vibecoding and co-founded the European Youth AI Index program, puts it this way:
“Women-only formats aren’t about protection, they’re about removing barriers that shouldn’t exist in the first place. We’re teaching the same tools, the same frameworks, the same problem-solving approaches as any other AI hackathon. The difference is that participants aren’t spending cognitive energy navigating gender dynamics while learning to build. The goal isn’t to create a permanent parallel track. The goal is to build competence and confidence fast enough that mixed spaces become genuinely accessible—not just theoretically open.”
The Start: Luxembourg, March 21, 2026.
Join the waiting list: www.women4vibecoding.eu
Women4Vibecoding Europe is running a pan-European hackathon on March 21, 2026. It's an all-day sprint (from idea to deployed prototype in 8 hours) where participants build AI-powered tools to address real business problems.
Who it’s for: Professional women across policy, tech, business, research, and communications. No prior coding experience required. We teach "Vibecoding,” an AI-assisted prototyping approach that treats code as a communication problem rather than a syntactic one.
What’s included:
EU AI Act compliance awareness is built directly into the development process (because regulatory literacy is part of technical literacy now).
Pre-configured templates. Mentorship from women already working in AI. And a focus on shipping working products, not just learning "about" AI.
What makes this different: Most corporate AI training is passive. You sit through slides, maybe try a demo, then return to your desk unchanged. This is the opposite. You leave with a functional prototype you built. That shift—from observer to builder—is the entire point.
Why You Should Care (Even If You Can’t Attend)
If you’re a man reading this and thinking, "This doesn’t apply to me," you're half right. You can’t participate. But you can:
Share this with women in your network who’ve expressed interest in AI but haven’t found an entry point
Recognize why this format exists without treating it as an attack on mixed events. Push for better beginner onboarding in your own communities so women-only events become unnecessary
If you’re a woman reading this and skeptical of women-only formats—fair. Some are performative. Some prioritize "empowerment" over execution. We're not interested in that. We’re interested in: Did you build something? Does it work? Can you explain how it works? If yes, you're technical. Full stop.
This isn’t the end state. The end state is mixed hackathons where participation, voice distribution, and confidence gaps don’t correlate with gender. We’re not there yet. Women-only formats are a temporary correction, not a permanent ideology.
But they’re still necessary. And that’s worth being honest about.
Women4Vibecoding Europe is a pan-European AI skills initiative coordinated from Luxembourg.
For updates and registration details: hello@women4vibecoding.eu
Future plans include open-format and mixed-gender advanced tracks. This is a pipeline, not a silo.
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