ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Twenty four hours devoted to computing has more of an interest than you may think.

"We have right now about 145 hackers which is kind of cool and amazing, we’re actually pretty much at full capacity," said Jessica Ancillotti, lead director of WiCHACKS at RIT. 

Rochester Institute of Technology’s Women in Computing program is hosting their tenth annual hackathon.

"We have 24 hours to work on a project and then at the end of it we get to demonstrate what we created and present it to a panel of judges," said Hanna Koh, computer science major.

Not only to spark new ideas, but also to spark motivation for women and gender minorities in the tech industry.

"Women feel almost all the time that they have to almost defend their intelligence so almost having a space like this allows them to just be intelligent, there’s no one they have to defend to," said Ancillotti.

According to data from LinkedIn, women make up less than 35% of the workforce of the United States largest tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

"The conversation is really about women and being able to just have a space where they can talk about experiences they’ve had as women and gender minorities in the STEM field," Ancillotti said. 

Some students say they have had experiences at other tech events that left them feeling the gap.

"I have had several," said Koh. "There was this man that came up next to me, handed the recruiter his resume while the recruiter was still reading my resume and the recruiter just took it and started reading his resume and I was just standing there."

And that's with minority women holding an even smaller percentage of the tech industry.

"I did have a group of people that were like, 'oh you’re Asian, you’re obviously good at chemistry, or your obviously good at computer science,' and that kind of invalidated my feelings of like, I put so many hours into this homework," said Alia Ulanbek Kyzyl, a computing exploration student.

The hackathon at RIT has competitions in different categories like game, app and website development.

"I’m just glad I get to spend a weekend creating a project with my friends," said Koh.

With the biggest prize being themselves.

"I like to do things out of spite a little bit, so I’m just like well then I’ll show them that I can do it better," said Koh. 

"Even if I don’t win anything it’s just gonna be a great experience of just working on a project and I don’t plan on sleeping tonight," said Ulanbek Kyzyl.