Seriously, stop with the booth babes | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, stop with the booth babes

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183 pointssciurus72 comments

I'm getting the impression from reading the other comments that most of the commenters just skimmed the article (or perhaps didn't read it at all, and drew assumptions from the title). If you need a tl;dr, or if you read it quickly, this is the most important line in the post:

> What you end up with is the situation where you, as a conference goer, walk up to a booth and, because you’re no stranger to how this works, ignore any attractive woman and talk directly to a male at the booth. You assume immediately that any attractive female is there simply for their physical appearance, not for the value that their knowledge brings.

This is not an abstract PC idea of feeling bad about objectifying the booth babe, or wishing to avoid temptation, or whatever. This is a very specific problem that is harmful to the industry and to all the non-booth babes out there. The OP goes on to make some suggestions on how to work towards fixing the problem, but please, if you're going to comment on this, make sure you understand the actual main point first.

Thanks for making the main point clear, I want to chime in here as a woman and someone who has represented my company from very early on at trade shows (and does to this day). In the telecom industry in particular these booth babes run rampant, they literally provide you with a form when you register to exhibit asking if you want to hire models.

At one event a couple years ago, a guy came over to talk with our CTO (a guy) and I and said point blank to me, "do you have an ownership stake in the company? if not, at least you've got one foot in the door to marry this guy?" Nevermind that I'm wearing my wedding ring! All I could do was paint a "go F&%$ yourself" smile on my face and wait for him to leave. The things I would have liked to say, but it just wasn't worth it in that context.

The problem is, most people don't walk up to me expecting me to know about APIs, building applications, solving problems specific to their industry or use case, how supply chain works, or anything else important to their business. This is perpetuated by booth babes. How do I know? If I dress in a frumpy or slightly less feminine style, instead of my normal stylish heels and a skirt suit, I get a different reaction. If I wear skinny jeans and flats and a tshirt or hoodie, look my age (early 20s) and have a self-effacing air, they think "oh she's a nerdy girl" and then they ask the real questions. PUH-LEASE.

</rant>

Oh - I should also mention that I DO think being a female works from the standpoint of getting booth traffic (can't fight it - sex sells, and you don't even need to be dressed in risque clothes to observe the difference). When I'm at the booth versus a guy, I think we get more traffic. The problem is, its less qualified and their intentions aren't easily converted to caring about our product, they're distracted by some other impulse.

Apart from the brain-dead flirting efforts, that heels-and-skirt-suit effect doesn't sound any different than my reaction to men in suits. If I want to find a clue, I look past the guy whose job involves showing up in a costume chosen in hopes I'm easily manipulated. But then I don't frequent trade shows, so I don't know how many nerds have enough clout to show up dressed normally but not enough to just stay home.

I wear a suit because it shows I give a damn, and occasionally to look a little older.

Many people in startups wear costumes too, just a different sort for a different purpose.

I realize that people in tech generally avoid "suits", but there is a time and place for dressing up and there are certain industries where you need to wear the uniform to play the game. Maybe it works to show up in flip flops as the founder of Facebook, but if you're trying to sell someone a mission critical product and they're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars...

...oh man, I digress, this thinking deserves a blog post of its own.

Sounds like it'd be worth a read. I found an example I remembered from The Big Short, finance rather than tech: "Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant he was in trouble, or schedule to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that."

I like wearing suits. I even like wearing ties.

I don't mean anything by it, I just like tailored stuff. It looks good! It's highly evolved to maximise what men have got. But: if I wore one to most of my meetings, or to work, people'd ask questions or make a bunch of unfounded assumptions, so I don't.

It's a myth that technical communities don't care about clothes. They do - it's just they send a very particular set of signals and, what's more, they're the signals common to countercultures. That's fine: it's just another code, no more or less than any other. It'd be discourteous to go against it. I'm still going to be thinking wistfully of the ties in my wardrobe, though!

A tailored well fitting suit is also extremely comfortable.

I bought a suit when I was in Syria two years ago and its probably the most comfortable piece of clothing I own.

Some years ago I had a brief consulting gig. I showed up in my standard t-shirt and jeans. There was another consultant there, whom I hadn't previously met, in a suit. When he sat down at the computer, I had to stifle an impulse to offer him assistance. Then I had to laugh at myself.

Since then I have tried to be more aware of my assumptions and less swayed by appearances, but I haven't always succeeded. Heh, I recall another incident where I roundly ignored an attractive woman at an entrepreneurship meeting, only to find she was a CEO and one of the panel speakers.

Look who you'd miss out on talking to:

The three-piece suit has become sort of my trademark. You don't see them much anymore. It has several benefits: You may be overdressed on some occasions, but you can manage to fit into a huge range of circumstances.

http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/vint-cerf-0...

Touché. Though he has such gravitas in our community that he could show up in assless chaps and be taken seriously.

Since dmor mentioned the telecom industry, let me just say that when I attended the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, everybody (except booth babes) was wearing suits or other "business attire" - technies, sales, marketing, whatever. (I was very clearly an engineer and was there to answer technical questions, and I wore a suit).

[OT: after having been to the trade show, I still don't know what CBOSS do, besides hire lots of models to man their stand...]

It's hard to believe that booth babes actually work in sales. I assume everyone knows that they are not going to get her number. She can't answer any questions obviously. Am I in the minority for feeling that hired fake flirty girls are insulting my intelligence with such a shallow attempt to manipulate me?

This actually made me wonder if they occasionally do get picked up. There must be some reason that guys think talking to them is not a waste of time...

You don't seriously think the male unconscious mind is that rational do you?

They're not for you. They're for the huge majority of bozos, who, unlike you, are only at the conference because it's a junket and some free time away from work. Eye candy is a huge plus.

By that logic, aren't the booth babes just as pointless? If the idea is to drive sales, and those people aren't there to make purchasing decisions, then it's a lost cause.

> those people aren't there to make purchasing decisions

He didn't say they couldn't make purchasing decisions. Besides, there's still likely to be some value in being front-of-mind when people go back to their companies.

Those people sometimes bring along a 'straight man'. I end up doing this all the time - the hypothetical boss just wants to drink for free and oogle pretty girls, and I talk to the sales engineer/sales guy. On the plus side, it keeps the boss distracted and stops stupid questions...

Aren't booth babes not just a copy of car shows? I think in car shows they are doing this because of the "when you drive (buy) this car you can get all the babes in the world".

I also don't get it in sports. Why should a striptease-looking-girl give the winner the price (motorsport for example)?

I think booth babes are an expression of "I've got nothing interesting for you so I hired some babes to get your attention".

Working as a male in a female dominated profession it is painfully obvious that this kind of behavior is not unique to men. I find it ironic that people want women somehow exempt from this unconscious behavior. It is not hard to spot the people male or female that dress to be taken seriously. I avoid the likely coulees sales rep irrigardless of gender and how they dress is a huge part of how I determine who needs to be avoided so i will not waste my time. If you are dressed like a salesmen or eye candy you have lost half the battle irrigardless of sex.

The only issue I see is how do you avoid forcing the ligitamate women into a second class uniform of sorts ie geek girl so they can be taken seriously.

I used to work on a medical technician team of five as the only male. We had to replace one of the women who left, so put out an ad. We all went through the resumes, and there were two with the techincal skills, both female. Everyone agreed on getting in those two. There was a third candidate who didn't have the proper tech skills, but he did have 'has appeared as a model on TV on this show and that show'. He was given an interview based on this line - my colleagues wanted to see the eye-candy, even though they denied it - there were women with better skill matches than this guy (though only the initial two had the right matches out of all). This guy got dragged into a job interview solely so the women could check him out physically; he was never going to get the job.

Learned this the hard way. Back when LinuxCon was still called LinuxCon, I made the mistake of making a beeline to the first "booth" I saw that was manned by a fellow female. I studied the setup, ascertained what kind of hardware being shown off by this particular vendor, and proceeded to inquire along the line of shop talk.

Although I don't remember exactly what I asked her, this was the gist of our exchange.

BB: "It's 2X faster!" (Vanna White, preening the chipset)

Me: "Faster than what?"

She appears panicked and quickly reads over the spec sheet behind her booth. Finally, after a minute, she looks up and says "It's just . . . faster."

Dear companies, giving the BBs a script isn't enough if they don't understand what the metrics on the script actually mean.

I also recall BSD staffing their booths (and the floor) with numerous women in red devil outfits, most of whom were quite technical.

There's Linux Journal's Carlie Fairchild, who's intelligent, informed, and beautiful, and has left a slew of broken hearts in her wake through no fault of her own.

There are a handful of other women in the Linux / Free Software community (it's overwhelmingly male), of whom Val Aurora and Erinn Clark come to mind (both have been involved in women/tech movements and between LinuxChix and Debian-Women there are numerous others).

But yeah, at trade shows, particularly those geared at suits and sales, the ornamental variety tends to be more common.

That said: I've found plenty of booths staffed by men who had little to no technical depth as well. To say nothing of, say, tech support lines.

A friend of mine went to linux.conf.au and went along to one of the 'women in open source' conferences. At the start of the conference, the presenter was talking about how insidious sexism is in the tech industry and what an uphill battle it is to fight against it. She asked for the women in the room to raise their hands if they feel they've encountered sexism holding them back in their careers.

My friend raised her hand - and in horror, the presenter recognised her as the woman she'd assumed was someone's partner back at the registration desk and tried to get to sign the partner's program (=daily things to do while your techy partner is doing the conference). Yes, the female anti-sexism speaker had herself assumed a female delegate was merely a hanger-on, solely because of her gender.

It's both "ha ha" funny and disturbing funny, that sexism is so ingrained that someone who should absolutely know better still fell prey to it.

Wait, they have booth babes at Linux conventions? Those poor girls...

What was once risque is now corporate and stale, such is the way of things.

Meanwhile innovators are shaking it up, take the Good Old Games parody on booth babes at PAX - grandmas handing out cookies:

http://geekfeminism.org/2011/08/28/booth-grandmas-at-pax-pri...

Good opportunity for startups to get attention - do something interesting and different. That's probably where the "booth babes" concept started to begin with.

As the only representative of my company in the region I hired "booth babes" to assist me at PyCon. It was a logistical necessity as we used several thousand dollars of computer equipment at the display. I requested they wear suits.

While I wouldn't characterize myself as shy, they were an order of magnitude better at engaging the attendees.

They combed the floors to make introductions. They brought me lunch so I could spend more time speaking with developers. They helped me identify potential candidates and kept the people who were apparently bored at bay.

> Ask questions regarding the technology. Ask about planned life cycles of the software, on use counts, and other things. Treat them exactly as you would an equal.

Not bad advice.

I sort of accept booth babes as a given (I'd prefer to get rid of them, too, but once one company uses them, everyone has to; at the very least companies should commit to "no first use").

The thing that surprises me is when "booth babe" type people turn out to be actually intelligent, informed, competent people who are knowledgeable about the product. Sometimes they're full time staff, and sometimes they're professional conference booth presenters, but there have been times when they actually knew more about the overall market and sometimes about the specific product than the company employees, mainly because they'd worked the same conferences over and over for different firms.

This is exactly the OP's point---the existence of booth babes has conditioned us to be surprised when an attractive woman, or possibly any woman at all, is "intelligent, informed, competent". This follow-on effect is even worse than the already-bad first-order effect (namely objectifying the booth babe herself).

Take gender out of it, I'm surprised when anyone who is related to a 'sales' dept at a conference booth is "intelligent, informed, competent". It's better at tech conferences, but still not a 100% given.

That's really quite sad when you think of it. Maybe my experience is some crazy outlier, but the sales people I've worked with both in shipping and in tech have been some of the smartest people I've known. Maybe these companies are sending the bottom of the barrel to conferences... I'm taking a note not to do that with my company.

That's confusing. If the sales people are the smartest at the company, how can the product be any good? Maybe you are talking to the wrong companies ;)

I've found sales engineers to be among the smartest people in most (enterprise) companies -- definitely smarter than the dedicated salespeople and absolutely smarter than the product engineers. They're basically the equivalent of the "rainmakers" in professional services; i.e. the people you bring in to convince the client that you're brilliant, but who don't actually work on your account once you're signed.

Conference booths are to collect leads, in general. Not to 'close'. I'd expect the bottom of the barrel there - they only need to get your name/swipe your card, and then you get turned over to the top notch sales people.

I think that's the problem. It's very tempting to abstract gender out of the picture by talking about the vacuity of sales staff in general, but gender is involved. There is an established narrative of women as pretty but useless, and the women in question are being fit handily into that role.

Look at it this way: if you talk to enough sales guys who don't know anything, you'll write off sales guys as being useless. But if you talk to enough booth babes who don't know anything, you'll write off attractive women as being useless.

Booth babes aren't defined, like sales people are, by their goals or their training, but simply by being pretty women. That's the only function they serve, and consequently the level that they're judged at. That's the danger here, that it's not just a matter of salespeople getting a bad rep, but establishing an entire gender as useful only as eye candy at conferences.

Down for me, here is the google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rt452e6...

  > Ask why their company wastes everyone’s time and their investors’ money using
  > people who provide no value.

There's a few statements there which aren't backed up by references. Which is cheaper: hiring extra people to staff a conference or flying out a bunch of $100/hr engineers, putting them up in hotels, and so on? I would think it's a waste of money to bring out the engineers. Not only in terms of expenses but also the opportunity cost of them not working for an entire week.

Of course, this depends on the audience. For something like CES, the average conference-goer will maybe pick up pamphlets and enter a draw. For that, hiring models who are experienced in trade shows and are comfortable interacting with people all day long are the better choice. For a conference which is far more technical and the audience will be interested in the nitty-gritty details of a technology, then only hiring models is likely a poorer choice. A hybrid approach might be worthwhile.

Also note that there are intermediate levels: we used to send tech support & systems engineers out rather than the core developers. They were used to talking to customers, knew enough to answer most questions and when they didn't could generate ensure that the question going back was well formed and went to the right person.

When I walk by a booth and some stunning girl - who in real life would never even look at me - comes out and says "hiiii!" in the most fake display of flirtyness imaginable, I instantly get the feeling that I'm being conned and I'll do my best to stay away from that place.

But there is a distinct difference in having BBs do actual presentations and having them answer real customer questions. I see nothing wrong with that as long as it doesn't get tacky. As a rule of thumb, I would advise tech companies that target nerdy types like me to get rid of generic BBs but to continue using good-looking but knowledgeable women to present stuff.

I've had similar experiences with booth babes not knowing what the company products are, specs or anything remotely useful to me. One of the points which jumped out at me in the article was this:

"You assume immediately that any attractive female is there simply for their physical appearance, not for the value that their knowledge brings."

This only due to my experience in expecting the eye candy to be something beyond just eye candy. Once you've conditioned me to only expect them to be that - then I'm going to skip them and seek out someone who knows something beyond the glossy pictures and swag their handing out.

Please get rid of the recruiter "babes" too!

I'd rather hold a conversation with a knowledgeable technical person than yet another clueless plastic barbie doll!

But she knows all about the C Sharps!

My experience lies in consumer events, and there are two simple reasons why booth babes are used.

1.) Visitors like them. 2.) Exhibitors themselves like them.

And reason 2 is the biggest. While number 1 would be enough to justify it in either case, most people base it purely on "hey, I love seeing booth babes, clearly they're a good idea". And it's hard to argue with the success they have.

You're forgetting 3.)

Both these groups of people are happy to be, and be perceived as, creepy.

I'm not sure why there is such a push against this in the states. Its very simplistic marketing, yes, and it does shift behavior (ignoring the women or overbearing attention to them) but them it seems all sectors use sex and sexuality to build attention.

I don't think the authors attempt to embarrass companies will work. Because it worked. You showed up at the booth. And any marketer will tell you that even a bad interaction is worthwhile. Attention is at the heart of this strategy.

If you want to reduce booth babes, avoid the booths completely. Treat them like kids with ADHD. Berating them wont work. Ignore them and they fall in line. (of course, that is a simplification)

Because it's crass. Because of that asshole at the Skyrim demo who screamed out "rape her" as soon as a female character appeared on the screen, and that this kind of advertising, if you can call it that, appeals to exactly that demographic.

Other cultures can handle sexuality better. Americans, male and female, toggle between acting like a a pack of feral dogs and a congregation of calvinists whenever the subject comes up.

Other cultures can handle sexuality better.

Which ones? And how do they do that?

In my personal experience, the Scandinavian cultures do it better by simply not making a big deal out of it.

When you teach all your children from a young age that nudity is naughty and sexuality doesn't exist, you shouldn't be surprised when they grow up ill equipped to handle such things maturely.

I am from Scandinavia and that's not really true. We like naked females as much as everybody else and will do as many stupid things to get them. What we don't have is a bunch of extremely religious people with power so the contrast makes it seem more easy going.

Fair enough. Still a huge improvement though if you ask me ;)

It's often been considered a problem in the states because there is a lack of women in the tech field. The high presence of booth babes at tech related events is rather disturbing for those few women in the field. I'd honestly be more okay with it if they actually tried to hire attractive in general, and not just attractive women.

Though, at the guts of it, if you have to sell your product with attractive people then you may not have much of a product to sell.

It's a nice idea, but I don't think I could muster up all the self-righteousness necessary to go through with it.

I want coworkers who were irresistibly drawn to making software as soon as they saw a computer. I don't much care who we could lure in adulthood by merely making the incidentals look more pleasant. If anything, I'd like to find a way to deflect the horde of male dilettantes we're saddled with, because they're showing up just shockingly unqualified and I'm past tired of interviewing them.

Besides, how many developers even get sent to trade shows other than staffing their employers' booths? Isn't that more a PM and marketing thing?

From my experience, "booth babes" are often just the girls from the marketing department. They're usually not clueless, but you do get handed off quickly to sales or tech.

The correct term is "women," not "girls." Unless, of course, your company is regularly in the habit of hiring children for marketing position...

The author only reinforces the fact that booth babes work. His argument that he hates them because he falls for them would probably only get me to consider using booth babes in the future. Sure, the approach is kind of 'Don Draper' but considering the audience... it's probably a viable marketing approach.

There's probably an argument there about looking for original marketing approaches, as booth babes are an old and one "might" say overdone idea.

but meh, bring on the booth babes.

Yes. I will remember your product. I will remember that you had a pair of very polite models wearing baby-doll tees with your logos on them, and that they were completely clueless about your product. I will never buy your product and actively recommend against it. I remember all the booth babes I saw at OSCON and LinuxCon this year, and I will not forget.

Did you all shun Apple when Foxconn employees started jumping to their deaths? I'm guessing not.

Is it possible that you'd be letting your bias get in the way of your business sense? What if those products could have significantly helped your business?

Seriously, lets get some perspective.

If women with tight clothing are the best reason you can think of to not purchase a product, that is a pretty damned good endorsement of that product... Your objectivity is compromised if that is how you make your decisions.

Seriously, lets get some perspective.

If women with tight clothing are the best way you can think of to sell your product, that's pretty telling of the technical merits of your product. It's safe to assume you've given up at that point, and you don't have anything else worthwhile to see.

Women in tight clothing and selling your product based on it's merits are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the two of them have been shown to make quite a powerful couple.

If you are making your purchasing decisions based on the presence of women in tight clothing instead of the absence of technical merits, you are compromised. You should be able to judge the technical merits while ignoring the "booth babes", otherwise you're not much better than people who only purchase products because of them.

If no technical merits are present, then you by certainly have a far better reason to not purchase a product than just "they had women in tight clothing".

You're holding the wrong end of the rifle at the moment - women in tight clothing and other stuff meant to draw attention are not 'the best way to sell your product', they're just advertising. Only when one has become interested in something can you sell him a product thanks to technical merits.

Yes. Because it's not called bias, it's called ethics and they help me sleep at night. And while the Apple issue was not applicable to me (I can't remember the last dollar I spent on an Apple product), I do, for instance, make a conscious effort to try and buy electronics that are made with conflict-free coltan (which is difficult due to the paucity of information on the subject).

I find your nonchalant suggestion sell out morally on this topic appalling, particularly as a woman myself.

Actually, my boycott of Apple started a long time ago, during the iPodLinux days, when Apple C&D'd people decrypting the fifth-generation iPod firmware.

Business should not preempt ethics.

The problem is that it's impossible to tell the knowledgeable ones from the BBs, so it's easier to ignore all the women at the booths. That doesn't help anybody.

This is true whether or not you "fall for" the BBs.

I think the author is doing a little bit of disservice to "marketing folk" (women AND men), who I think he is really referring to here as "booth babes".

"Booth Babes" tend to refer to models who dress provocatively purely to entice people into the booth - seen more at b2c conferences and lower-order, less sales-driven b2b conferences like game conferences and CES.

Engineers > Sales people > PR/Marketing people > Booth babes

As a (female) software engineer at Google, I once staffed a booth at CES. CES doesn't, to my knowledge, have many booth babes, and there certainly weren't any at the Google booth. Despite this, I had a number of people DIRECTLY ask if I was a booth babe. And who knows how many more people just assumed I was and avoided talking to me entirely...

It wasn't a big deal. I mean, I'd seen this my whole life. And that's just the thing. It's every job, every conference, every meetup, every event, and every single conversation. It's constantly having to prove that you're technical.

And even once you've offered up a bunch of credentials, you still aren't perceived as being as technical as a man with the same credentials.

It's exhausting. And I'm so, so tired of it.

Changing how people think is hard; changing company policy is much easier. Ending "booth babes" is one of many steps to ending sexism, but every step counts.

Sounds like a good prank to send female representatives and booth dudes just to confuse people's preconceived notions. Pretty useful if the company wants to come across as non-hetero-male.

I think that's better than just male/female representatives behind a desk trying to make a passive statement.

'Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. Please try your request again later. Why did this happen?'

I got this earlier when I tried to open several cached links at once. An hour or two later and I'm still getting it for no reason. Wireshark confirms and I have a public IP address.

Let's speculate.

Let us say that we were to end all booth babe jobs tomorrow.

Result: 1000s of women lose a job that brings them some extra (and perhaps needed) cash. But we all get to feel better about ourselves. Except for the women, because they have one less source of income.

Alternative: we embrace the fact that we are sexual beings. Maybe sex appeal does not work on everyone, but it is a tried and true form of advertising. I do not think it is demeaning to women - I think it is empowering. What is demeaning is treating women like they should not have the choice to take these jobs.

The main problem is using them at a trade conference. They are basically dead weight if they don't know anything about the products. This article isn't about being demeaning, but about encouraging anti-women bias in tech circles. BBs are hurting our society.

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