Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

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> but the root problem is the sexism, not the ad copy.

I agree it was a very sexist thing to write. It makes me wonder though:

1. Which is worse, hiring an all female serving staff (perhaps wearing uniforms that would be considered particularly attractive to heterosexual males), or acknowledging that you have done this by writing about it in your invitations? Is it inappropriate (always and everywhere) to hire only attractive females and make them wear "sexy" uniforms? If they had hired all females, but not advertised it, would people still be upset after they had arrived and seen that all the staff were female? I wouldn't be upset. But advertising it, or at least they way they did it, strikes me as offensive, but I don't know why.

2. I feel mentioning the female serving staff in this instance is inappropriate, but is it always inappropriate? Is it acceptable for a sports bar to mention their "Bud Girls" or whatever in their ad copy? I would consider this acceptable, but I don't know why. Is it because a sports bar is purely leisure, and a hackathon, while leisure, is (presumably) directly connected to your profession?

I think what they did feels wrong, but I can't think of a good explanation of why it is wrong that is logically consistent with other acceptable norms in our society.

The point I'm trying to make is that thinking of hiring women staff as a "perk" is sexist and unprofessional, and you shouldn't do it. It assumes that everyone attending is a straight guy, and it also assumes that the straight guys that attend want to be included in your sexual fantasies.

As to the larger society, yes, "Bud Girls", booth babes, GoDaddy ads, and Hooters are all sexist.

FYI, there is an upscale restaurant where I go regularly for lunch that has only attractive women.

(Not Hooters)

There is a difference between a hackathon and a restaurant. There are actually restaurants that hire very good looking men also because they are going for a certain clientele. Sexuality sells a lot of things, but that's hormones and money.

The problem here is that a goodly chunk of people expect the clientele of a hackathon to be developers. Developers are men and women who are professional. As much as sexuality sells beer, food, cars, etc., it is not a accepted selling point of professionals. Rather, it will get you in serious trouble in many professional environments.

Now, it is revealed that this company's fantasy event is programming while being served beer by hot women. This basically puts them in the frat with a big no hire for women.

> it is not a accepted selling point of professionals. Rather, it will get you in serious trouble in many professional environments.

Not to defend Sqoot at all, but... um... booth babes? Every large trade show has them. They are there specifically to excite the hormones of the male professionals in attendance. Their use is as sexist as it is effective.

Had Sqoot quietly hired a bunch of models to serve beer to the attendants, and had they had the sense not to publicly high-five themselves for doing so, there would have been no controversy. The reason Sqoot landed in the soup is because they wore their sexism on their sleeves, and handled their communications like obnoxious rubes rather than responsible business owners. Their crime was lack of finesse.

Just because a form of sexism is pervasive doesn't mean it isn't also offensive and demeaning to people. Part of being professional and encouraging diversity is not promoting a frat-like or male-dominated business culture.

I completely agree. I was just pointing out that sexism of this nature had gone on for years without apparent protest. I was not defending the practice.

Booth babes are a problem and the protests have gone up about them (to the point of misidentifying a women as a booth babe will get you in trouble).

If they had quietly done it and female developers had showed up, the damage would have been worse, much worse. Words are one thing, pictures of scantily clad models serving beer at a hackathon would have been a little too juicy for the bloggers. Twitter pictures turn into mainstream media articles rather quickly these days.

Their crime is thinking it was acceptable. As my Dad told me (constantly as a youth it seemed), "I'm amazed you thought of that, and appalled you actually did it." Fantasy is best kept out of the professional workplace / event planning.

"Their crime is thinking..."

Can somebody help me to issue a DMCA notice?

There are crimes of state and of the heart and mind. Some require paperwork and lawyers. Others result in groups of people expressing their disapproval in various ways. Both can be very serious and poor times for levity.

This was obviously a throwaway account, but nevertheless I just thought I would say that if you want to find out where your ego is too strongly invested, you need only look as far as those areas of your life where you are unable to laugh at yourself. I mean come on, man. I actually agreed with the rest of what you wrote...

It just struct me as a snippy reply and someone trying to laugh off a subject that keeps coming up in our industry. I hate when people laugh off this type of stuff. I figured I'd try (not much of a writer really) to give a less snippy answer. I didn't really succeed. I apologize if that wasn't your intent for the reply and thought behind it.

I can laugh at myself (and I do quite often). If I didn't I think I would have gone insane by now. I don't even have a problem with Hooters, Playboy / Playgirl, or any of the thousands of other places sex is used to sell things. Like I said, hormones and money.

I'm just a little sick of the lack of empathy in this situation. The "midwestern" discussion had the same vibe (obviously not as damaging). Maybe I'm just sick of TV Shows showing a buffalo every damn time they talks about ND, or (much, much more importantly) I'm just sick of thinking about how many developers we have lost because of stuff like this. Can't really be a Meritocracy if stuff isn't based on merit.

It's fine, I'm not offended. The thing is it's very clearly not a meritocracy. There was a comment recently about how Linus got about $1M out of his RedHat shares, and how this seems totally unfair next to someone like Zuckerberg or even say GitHub. The easy money flowing around this current startup bubble is what's attracting the frat boy mentality. As far as empathy is concerned, I think it's pretty much a write-off when mediated by technology. Hell, we can't even get the tone of each other's posts right. And to generalize quite a lot, empathy and making money are just sort of fundamentally odds with each other. I'm sure you'd never see booze bitches (their mindset, not mine) at a free software hackathon.

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