Not all heterosexual males that are interested by such events are undersexed hormone bombs that care more about women than about actually building cool stuff.
I find this sort of behavior insulting to our trade.
If you don't get this, then you are missing a lot. Generally speaking men on average will enjoy themselves a lot more if there are pretty girls around. There is a restaurant in town that serves Swiss Chalet grade food in town but all the chicks wear miniskirts and look like models. Even on a week night it is packed with businessmen tipping extravagantly. Sex sells, and sex appeal is a real perk.
The problem is that what is a perk targetting 90% of the target demographic and appeals to probably 85% of those, happens to be off-putting to minorities some want to attract into the industry.
Either way, you are treating women as objects, as perks, as things that men want to look at. And you are treating men as cavemen who want to see women all the time. These ideas have affected (and are affecting) society in a bad way. By using women in that sense, they are promoting the idea that women can be used in that way if you like.
Interesting article here covering sex (not gender) gap: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/programming-and-development...
...and then there's the actual BLS stats here (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat11.txt) which suggest something like 20% females in the workforce.
In the game industry, at least as of the IGDA survey in '05, we see something like 92% identify as straight (http://archives.igda.org/diversity/IGDA_DeveloperDemographic...).
So, we could back-of-the-envelope that perhaps a figure of 75% is reasonable, and 85% is not absurd as a guesstimate if you don't fact check.
I'm so glad my co-workers occasionally manage to focus on the work at hand instead ;)
Not at all, all I meant to convey was that it appeals to a large section of the largest demographic and that overall it probably still appeals to over 50% of the target group. Percentages were used for rhetorical flourish not to imply actual statistical data beyond personal experience.
However, you can go about this in a refined way, e.g. Dell's "fashion campaign", http://www.writingfordesigners.com/?p=1885) a few years ago) or in a crude way (well, GoDaddy comes to mind).
Sexism aside, if I'm some place where I intend to get some coding done, pretty girls in short skirts are only going to distract me.
(this is not a good thing.)
The pointlessness of this "perk" is what bugs me the most. It's an API hackathon - how is it relevant to include a statement that basically says: "nothing better than hawt women bringing you beer, amirite?"
That sort of copy has the target demographic of potential Hooters customers, not programmers.
And I wouldn't argue with that. In the short time I was in Japan I blew I don't even want to think about it levels of money on hostess bars and just about all the other sort of fun you can imagine.
But really, there's a time and a place for that sort of thing and a hackday/tech-conference just isn't it.
> The problem is that what is a perk targetting 90% of the target demographic and appeals to probably 85% of those, happens to be off-putting to minorities some want to attract into the industry.
I'm in an ethnic minority for the industry and I simply do not care about attracting minorities. What I do care about is the mountains of gold in them there hills that are ready for the plundering when we learn how to start selling software to women. Having female engineers will probably help with that.
I am saddened by the implication here that selling good software that solves problems for everyone should somehow be less lucrative then exploiting cultural norms and stereotypes.
This mindset is something that we, being in a new field, have a unique opportunity to overcome.
I'm not sure I did imply that. I don't think we're particularly good at selling software that solves problems for everyone to women.
If the software truly solves problems for everyone, why should we have to pick a marketing strategy that segments the population of potential users (previously stated to be everyone) by sex or gender?
No, no, a thousand times no. The gaming industry used to think like that. Ernest Adams explained the fallacy of that thinking most eloquently in his article "Games for Girls? Eeeeewww!" [1]
You don't want to "sell software to women". You want to sell software to your target userbase. You want to sell software to people whose problem that software solves. Unless your software is solving a specific problem that only women have, then you're not "selling software to women".
[1] http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/004_Games_for_Girls...