It's great to see that the list of changes to make does not include anything enormous, ground-breaking or incredibly difficult. The author is basically proposing a few subtle changes to the tone of the hackathon -- I'm glad to see it had such a huge impact.
There is no evidence that the huge impact was caused by these subtle changes. It is far more likely that the even gender split was obtained by the ticket quotas omitted in the original post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4282226
