I wasn't talking about the competition. Success in the female only codejam led to tickets to Google I/O. It's a conference and a very popular one at that - the sort of conference where the organisers routinely give attendees free phones. Do you really think in previous years there were hundreds of seats sitting empty, hundreds of tickets that could have been sold sitting around unsold?
I can tell you what happened. Conference seats that were previously gender neutral got reserved for women, by the creation of another mechanism that was also reserved for women. Zero sum games.
That proves that it isn't always zero-sum. They've opened up more spots by creating an additional event for women.