Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse
blog.katylevinson.com
blog.katylevinson.com
And yes, I know everybody's probably sick of gender issues, and that's why I almost didn't bring it up, but I hoped it would be a chance for a good civil discussion, and I'm really glad to see it turning into that. Hopefully someday soon everything can be awesome, we'll never have occasion to talk about this garbage again, and we can all go back to nerding. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to that day.
But, seriously, the civility and respect here have totally blown me away. Really proud to be a part of this community. Thanks everybody, you give a lady hope!
"Don't stop, belieeeeeeving! Streetlight! People!"
There are some pretty obvious booth babes (the energy drink girls, ones with swords, etc.) There are women who, while perhaps non-technical, legitimately work for the companies they're hawking. I don't get the impression they're hired guns, though I haven't done a survey.
Perhaps it's easy to say because I'm not a woman, but I think I'd feel less uncomfortable here than anywhere else where I was outnumbered 10:1.
All of those tools are still b2b companies, and b2b software companies have lots of non-technical people. Sales, support, execs, etc. I haven't done a poll but I'd bet even here the non-technical people are at least 50%.
I would assume those people are technical until evidence to the contrary presents itself.
You highlight a real issue, though. Given the percentages, if a technical conference has a large percentage of non-technical attendees, it is likely women will be seen to have the "technical" bit off. Certainly more women in tech would fix it, but that isn't the solution, because we won't get more women in tech if they continually feel uncomfortable.
Conference organizers could do more. Instead of "attendee"- and "vendor"-type badges, they could have more detailed badges that are noticeable quickly and easily. I know I would appreciate knowing at a glance, in any technical conference, how technical the person I'm talking to is. Saves us time talking past each other or covering ground we both already know.
a) exhausting to have to change every person's perception of you prior to being able to really engage in conversation b) demoralizing when your male peers are treated with more respect automatically based on their gender c) a sad loss of opportunity to engage in the discussion, when no opportune moment arises where you can comfortably communicate that you are qualified to participate
The author cited conversations where men she was with did not have the same experience as her. She essentially had to work harder in order to be seen as an equal participant.
Sending people to do product promotional is perfectly legitimate depending on the type of event. Even if you weren't deliberately targeting a male audience with attractive females (although I'm sure that was the case), odds are that if you were recruiting for that kind of work 90% would be outgoing and attractive young women. Just like recruiting programmers will get you 90% geeky white males.
Already in that first day one of the less attractive, but probably more skilled, co-workers told me that in most cases you're actually selling 'having an attractive person be very friendly to me for a while.'
This sentence intrigues me. Were you working for a specific charitable organization or were you out there trying to sell one of the cardinal virtues as an abstract concept?
> in most cases you're actually selling 'having an attractive person be very friendly to me for a while.'
This is true, and it has been rediscovered over and over again in many industries in many ways. Some industries are really that and nothing else, and they have long, honored, and storied traditions in some cultures (so denigrating them means you're an ethnocentric swine, in case you missed my hint).
One week you'd try to get people to donate to a child cancer charity and the next to WWF and the sales company would get the first few months to half a year of that person's donations.
Heck, an attractive woman can stop more people on the street and ask directions, and the person they stop will spend more time talking to them and helping them than they would with an average person.
And I think this behavior is true for men and women. It's not just a small segment of society that behaves that way, it's all of society.
So yes, it's true in PR and Advertising in general.
1. Do not hire eye candy as eye candy. Of either sex. Dressed up or dressed down.
2. Product promotion staff should be clearly labeled as such.
At least first class seems to skew toward the younger and hotter (but still competent). (Especially in Asian and Middle Eastern airlines where they haven't gone all PC yet.)
But mens' nature being what it is, we can expect that most (straight) men would rather have a flight attendant who's more
female / younger / attractive
and less
male / older / unattractive.
Ouch! Let's hope she doesn't read HN!
Eye candy is extremely effective in marketing. That's like saying "don't hire smart programmers". Why would companies handicap their marketing efforts?
Trying to get people to deprogram their own biology at a very deep level is probably going to be a losing battle.
Surely this is a parody?
Do you know any men in real life? Unless you're just trolling, I find it hard to believe that you actually believe this.
Marketers have (I can only assume) found that triggering the former to lead to the latter is a working strategy (they do tend to at least try to base their actions on observed results). Even if that's not the case the concept that there's a dual throw switch for power between the gonads and the brain seems pretty silly and needlessly underestimates men (though it sort of overestimates them at the same time I guess...).
A man has both brains and balls, to expect that he can switch one of those off or pretend it does not exist is unrealistic. (Obviously, this does not excuse a man if he sexually harasses a woman or otherwise behaves badly.)
But honestly, someone who uses the concept "ugly women" is failing so hard at sexism already they might as well be a character from "Mad Men".
I suspect you mean they are succeeding at being sexist?
Also, why is it sexist to acknowledge that some people are better looking than others? Clearly, making this sort of judgment about a non-customer-facing role is inappropriate, but is it wrong to acknowledge that looks play a part in customer contact[1] roles?
[1] In person, obviously. No one care what the call center person looks like as long as they speak English.
More generally, calling things "PC" is a lazy shortcut, a straw man attack.
I mean, unless someone actually sincerely says to you "oh, reinhardt, you mustn't say XYZ, I want you to be politically correct". In that case, mock away.
I absolutely disagree with JulianMorrison (that "us[ing] the concept 'ugly women' is failing so hard at sexism ..."). My disagreement has nothing to do with suspecting him of being "PC", nor do I dismiss other related claims from other people because of the existence of this statement.
| literally pictures of vaginas?
The problematic assumption here is that a given woman was paid to be there. This was a reasonable assumption on the part of the other attendees, only because there are so few women in the games industry.
So rather than the problem-to-tackle being a cat-and-mouse with vendors trying to get the most-effective promotions' staff to the venue, the problem-to-tackle is women in gaming.
If women could hit even a respectably-sized minority of the attendee audience, the assumption would no longer be safe.
That's what I find so strange about the original post. She's assuming they're there as eye candy and they sure don't seem to be. It's odd to hear a woman assume that other women (especially since they're pretty average) are there for their looks. The few I've talked to were far too knowledgeable to be some sort of incognito booth babes.
Booth babes are usually given a few talking points and know little to nothing else about the product beyond that. They pass you off to the nerd the second you appear interested.
Perhaps it's because of the negative stereotype that the more attractive a women is, the less intelligent she is, or at least less likely that she's a technical person. And perhaps it's not just men that make this assumption.
And, yes, I'm distinguishing from actual staff who do know the product/service/industry and aren't just contracted short-term to draw people in.
Given the article's description, I figured that's what was going on. But, not having been there, I could definitely be getting the wrong idea from an unfair characterization.
Though it still sounds as though the core problem is the low number of women in the games industry, rather than what marketing departments may have done to skirt 'booth babe' rules.
That's not a "booth babe", if they're being dressed down they've generally been giving training on the actual products. In that case, they're just spokespersons like the attractive marketing dudes with the excellent veneers.
How about: Highly visible conference badges that differentiate spokespersons from developers?
There would be motivation for companies to game this, so that they could have spokespersons with "female geek cred." I think that this could be handled to within reason. Also, it might motivate companies to send their actual female employees, thus giving females more exposure at GDC.
I suppose you could have everybody wear a badge that lists their job title, except not everybody is there representing a company. Large buckets, then? Artists, engineers, management, product, technical other, non-technical other?
These saleswomens' employers are giving them dress-code guidelines already - " telling OTHER women how they must dress". That was true with "booth babe" dress and presently. The woman's blog post was clearly addressed to GDC which seems to have set the tone for the companies at the booth who hired their saleswomen/demonstrators. There's no situation of a woman commenting about another woman's clothing choice on, say, her day off.
If you have "booth babes" (I think she did a great job in the article of defining what that term means), I'm not going to buy your product. I hate it and always have. Its trashy and demeaning, and I resent being grouped into the lowest common denominator when I go to view a product I actually care about. As demeaning as it is to women, I think a lot of men would agree that its demeaning to be treated like a dog who can be baited with a doggy treat.
If you have a good product, you don't need to lure in knuckle draggers who let themselves be led around by their reproductive instincts.
How do you know if she was hired because she was attractive or because of other skills/attributes or a mixture of both?
Though that might be a good strategy to discourage "booth babes", just keep asking shit they can't answer.
I ask that at the grocery store when I have a question and I'm not sure if the person is an employee of the store or one of the store's suppliers.
Saying "Do you know anything about this product, or are you tits for hire?" doesn't seem like a great question either..
The problem the OP faced was that people at the conference were generally sorting people into the general categories of "technical and worth talking to" or "just trying to sell me something" and would make the Bayesian inference that a random woman they came across was in the latter category.
I can see two solutions here, neither of which is very good:
1) In order to promote gender equality, everyone at a conference should avoid judging people based on their gender. This would be ideal, but it's hard to fight casual statistical inference.
2) The conference could make sure that the people selling stuff at the booths and the people attending the conference have similar demographic profiles, so a random woman you encounter at the conference is as likely to be technical as a random man. In practice, though, this would mean preferential hiring of men for the promotional jobs.
Really, we need an option (3) of "get more women to be developers" but that's hardly news, and not something that can be solved in short order.
It's almost as though you need to get ugly women - if the women are too attractive, then they are written off as "booth babes". Which is kind of sexist in its own way.
It's one of the hidden sides of sexism in our society that annoy me. I try to catch myself whenever I find myself doing that, and have been pleasantly surprised.
A side effect of this is that those women that are attractive and intelligent tend to begin to hide it. So you get self-reinforcing behavior from society. Things like guys belittling smart women etc... The whole thing is annoying from the perspective of a guy that loves talking to non-white guys about programming or almost anything interesting. /squirrel banter mode off.
Case in point: Hedy Lamarr, who is probably more well known for her beauty than for her contributions to science (http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT2292387)
Make them large and noticeable, on a lanyard probably.
Absolutely not true. There is no shortage of male actors and models. Whatsoever. And the prettier they are, the bigger the pay delta vis-a-vis the female actors and models. Whoever is hiring booth babes is actively excluding men, and paying through the nose to do it.
I could see male booth attendants having similar issues.
Also, lots of gentlemen are highly trained to keep their eyes up so they aren't accused of staring at boobs. I'm not sure if any of them would read my shirt anyway.
Here are our options:
1. Require a strict dress code for booth babes as to not offend anyone with scantily clad women. Result: we can't tell booth babes from technical females.
2. Require everyone working at the conference to be an active and knowledgable employee of the company which has purchase the booth space. Result: number of females on the show floor drops precipitously.
3. Require a 1:1 ratio of males to females. Result: booths are understaffed or companies don't even bother showing up.
4. Wait until ratio of males to females in the given industry is 1:1. Result: conferences cancelled.
If I was a female, and I'm not, I would be insulted that other females were trying to stop me from getting a job. I know a lot of girls who work as "booth babes" and they are busting their asses just as much as any of us are. It's not easy traveling around and standing all day long in uncomfortable shoes for pay that is slightly better than peanuts.
I cannot actually see a problem with #2, it would be my preferred solution. When I go to trade shows / conferences it is to talk to brains, not bodies, the sex of the brain is immaterial to me.
To me, making sure the bodies are 50% equal in gender means nothing if 80% of the female bodies are only there to make up a body quota but have no interest / knowledge of what is going on.
Maybe change it slightly so that the rules state anyone at the booth must be a full-time employee or a contract employee with X months at the company.
Could you go into a bit more detail about your reasoning for #2 not being suitable?
[EDIT] Messed up my percentages
My proposal is purely to get rid of the "Pretty face, no knowledge, hired solely for the event" style of "booth-babe".
Of course companies could hire people for the require X months but I am hoping the monetary aspects of that would discourage them.
Also, enforcing the proposal would be tricky I think.
I don't claim to know what it's like to be a woman in a heavily male-dominated field (or just your de facto patriarchy, for that matter), but I also don't assume anyone I'm talking to at a conference has any reason to believe I possess any sort of prowess or authority without my convincing them of such even while donning my geekiest T-shirts.
More importantly, I assume anyone representing a product or service at a show is knowledgeable about its inner-workings until they give me some reason to believe otherwise regardless of their gender or attire.
While I appreciate that it is often difficult dealing with misogyny at conferences, I think it's unfair to lump a proper PR employee in with a model in a Princess Leia slave bikini who knows nothing about the product.
You most certainly are not.
The author is simply pointing out that ending the booth babe situation isn't a panacea. The real issue is the shortage of actual technical contributors who are also women:
> Goodness knows, if I had the power to bring tons of other technical women at the conference that would be an optimal solution
> but barring that, selfish as it may sound, if I could have substituted all the plain-clothes promoters for traditional booth babes, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
Of course, progress isn't a panacea, but I'd take progress over the "old days," myself. I've personally seen the number of confidently technical women at conferences increase year over year for the past decade (please note, I'm not saying that the status quo is optimal, just that, in my experience, there _has_ been progress).
Moreover, the _title_ of the piece concludes with "Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse" which contradicts what you said.
That must get pretty tiring at a conference like this (assuming the description in the post is accurate). People don't stereotype for fun, they do it because it's effective.
Walking a crowded expo floor is a chore in and of itself (maybe more-so for introverts like myself :) ), but the '10 GDC I attended wasn't particularly challenging in this regard.
How did this happen? I seriously doubt it's because girls in bikinis stopped being effective. But when you can't get away with sexualized advertisement without being martyred, you're going to look for similarly effective marketing that won't offend the people throwing the stones, and in my opinion they've done exactly what we should have expected in this situation.
I'm not saying it's right or that women shouldn't expect to be treated as equals. I am saying that the tech community (and several others) have tried and are trying so hard to reject sex and sexuality and any application of it that might possibly offend someone that we're finally making it worse. Before it was just an obnoxious inability to be comfortable with ourselves. Now that we've gotten to the point where everyone knows how prudish and hyperconservative we are, they've also figured out how to keep marketing to us effectively without offending our delicate sensibilities. And we're still upset.
It's a shame that so many men have such a hard time conducting themselves well in mixed professional company. It's also a shame that we are so utterly unable to be men and women without pigeonholing ourselves and harassing each other over it. It's a sad situation.
I mean I don't really know how else to put it. No group of grown ups standing around at a conference would notice the number of "booth babes" and then get upset. Something which happened to gamers a little while ago.
So a bunch of pretty girls who probably didn't like being there in those places very much to begin with lost their jobs. The hyper insecurity of attendees at these conferences and previously mentioned "weirdness" are contributors. Many, from my research of the opposition to "booth babes" are insecure that they are not regarded as adults due to "booth babes" being around. Even some people in this thread have stated that they don't like being marketed to as knuckle draggers.
Well. The gaming industry is largely populated by adolescents, that is why the marketing that is chosen gets chosen. If they were adult enough to not mind the presence of "booth babes" and just enjoy themselves at the conferences, investigating the technologies they are interested in things could be a lot better.
But they're not. Things are weird. Interactions are stressful and now marketers need to awkwardly conceal their attempts at marketing.
Let's get this straight: It's not a sin. Objectification is just a particular functional state.
There is only a problem when there is a systemic imbalance that either consistently robs a particular group of agency. There is nothing inherently wrong with objectification. When you are being a spokesperson, you are voluntarily being objectified. You have basically taken on the role of an information appliance -- one with a friendly face and engaging manner, hopefully. This is fine. What would be wrong is if everyone treated you this way depending on some trait, like your gender or race. (Which is what happens when people assume female developers are paid shills or when people assume that the females in the current context are just decorative.)
The notion that "Objectification = Sin" is onerous nonsense. Denizens of a complex multicultural world need to turn on the brains and understand functional implications. We should stop using labels and tribal knee-jerks. Our new world is too complicated for those old heuristics.
A lot of people find it hard to resist sales pitches from attractive people. Very few people can stay aloof of the social advances of attractive people.
Believe it or not, most companies with an attractive sales person, also have a technical sales engineer on hand to talk to you once you are hooked. I used to be a technical sales engineer, so I'm familiar with the hustle at the GDC. You have the attractive woman pull people in, and then she stands around while the engineers talk about the product. A lot of times the people have no interest in the product, but sometimes someone who came for the girl stays to hear about the product, and three months later is a client, because it turns out he needs your software after all.
It sucks, but its just the way most males work.
I'm used to this hustle, that is why at trade shows I avoid eye contact with the marketing/sales people and make a beeline directly for the materials/people I'm interested in.
I propose the people that want to talk technical and be treated as "nerds" all wear propeller beanies from now on. That way we'll be able to tell our fellow hackers, and it will also root out those annoying fashion conscious nerds.
I don't think that was OP's point, per se. It's that the bikini-clad "uniform" tended to provide an automatic distinction between the women hired to staff booths from the women attending the conference. Once that distinction was removed an unfortunate bias and/or numbers game kicked in: attendees started implicitly assuming "woman == hired help."
"Out of the frying pan and into the fire" has never been such a depressing turn of phrase. :-P
I should also point out that meaningful conversations can happen between the marketeer and techies, but what do we do with the non-exibitor PHBs that attend.
The problem is that every one treats women using their sexual attraction like it is a bad thing (or it somehow undervalues their intelligence -- which it does not; just because you value one thing does not mean you don't another). I don't think there is any shame in it. We have been promoting products with sexual appeal since the dawn of advertising. Everybody get off their high horse already and accept that we are beasts of nature. :)
> [...] if I could have substituted them all for traditional booth babes, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Then I’d be free to have a great time being what I normally am at conferences: a curiosity, an anomaly, and an excitable nerd.
In my opinion, this trivializes what was, prior to its inclusion, a worthwhile lament. The conclusion makes it sound as if the author is ultimately dismayed not that she was dismissed as being unworthy of unadulterated engineer-speak, but more so bothered by the fact that she was no longer the center of attention and no longer unique. I'm sure in reality she cares much more about being the former, but it was quite a shallow consummation to an otherwise interesting piece.
Her point was that marketers are hiring people as "developer evangelists" (hint) to show up at conferences in plain clothing, attract male attention, and sell products.
This is a pretty basic marketing technique used by probably every brick-and-mortar on the planet. Look at the way that clothing stores hire employees.
The author's issue is that before this became mainstream, she was easily identifiable as not a marketer. She wasn't in a bikini, and wasn't obviously selling anything. She was just in plain clothes attending a conference.
So while she was, in her words, a curiosity, people could reasonably assume that she was attending because she was a dev, not because she wants to "evangelize" at them.
Now that "hire a pretty, bubbly girl to talk to people for you" has become common in tech, people can reasonably assume that the "curiosity" in the crowd is probably there because she was paid to be there.
(And my comment wasn't so much addressing the article as the GP comment which said "I wish we had more men who dressed up as booth babes.")
Booth babes and female sales reps are an interesting thing to discuss, but we can't individually change the whole marketing culture. But we can individually make the tech scene more inclusive just by being more sensitive about the way we interact with other people. So please, please, please don't make assumptions about me or start presumptuously explaining things to me without asking what I do.
"Hi I'm {Name}, This topic fascinates me as I'm also a developer..."
And go from there?
Women in technical fields (and nearly every woman in tech whom I've befriended mentions this) get subtle cues that men don't even notice, because we're not the target.
(Worst yet is that women have a tendency to do it to each other as well!)
It's as if you have the bozo bit dropped on you before you've spoken a word, and you're continually fighting an uphill battle.
Our sales guy came to a conference and between the talks was desperate for people to talk about something other than code, anything else. And everyone seemed happy to oblige once aware.
Seems to me like these are just examples of people taking branch prediction optimisations.
GDC was a worse experience because it was profoundly isolating, and made me feel like an outsider. Also, I don't see an easy solution coming to fix it, which makes the situation feel more depressing.
If you’re competent and honest and work hard, I respect your chops. I don’t care how you dress.
When I was working at Google the cafes provided a great place to watch people. Here was a large sample of silicon valley engineers. And looking at the way they chose to wear was fascinating. From really carefully put together outfits, to random sets of things, to carefully selected to appear random but not actually be random. An amazing spectrum.
What I concluded is that if you make no conscious choice at all, your random selection will be biased toward what your eye has seen on others. That leads to a homogeneity in appearance which is both unintentional and obvious when you look for it.
The interesting people for me were the ones who looked like they were part of the random crowd except they didn't have the sort of random mistakes that came with true randomness. Either by design or a natural fashion talent I don't know. But interesting anyway.
A de facto norm that arises out of any subculture. When you have enough people all hanging around each other all the time, all kinds of things develop, including fashion.
> "We're all about judging worth based on who someone is and what they've done..."
> "is when I have to deal with certain business types who are perfectly comfortable with a monocle & a pocket watch"
So... you balk at being judged on your fashion choices, but you're more than willing to judge others for their fashion choices? These two sentences refute each other.
You can't make a post complaining about people stereotyping engineers, while stereotyping "business types" in the same sentence.
Last year: Holy mother of God we have so many hookers at this event. This has to stop! Now!
This year: Holy mother of Dog... we have too many regular looking people. This has to stop. NOW!
I can't keep it all straight. I'm pretty sure the only solution is for everyone to wear the same colored body suit that masks all indications of gender, a mask to cover the face and an auto-tune device to cover the voice. And everyone will just have a number badge so names are not a hint. I guess we should probably have a different color suit for the non-technicals?
But I hate the concept of giving up fighting for yourself. Why not put a few people in their place? If that's just not in your nature, fair enough; but I say make a few guys feel like idiots by stepping up to the plate with your expertise. If they don't like it, that's their problem.
And if that fails, I like davidrobert's idea as well -- maybe wear a shirt that has a really nerdy programming joke on it. Or, better yet, the HN shirt ^_^ -- http://teespring.com/hntees
And yes, I have a lot of geeky T-shirts. I don't like the idea of having to dress a certain way to be taken seriously, it seems very "un-engineering."
The shirt comment was more cheeky, not intended as a serious recommendation =)
And yet on HN, I regularly find engineers who can't seem to grasp any of these things. Maybe it's because we're in the web age, when so much of our work is visible, or maybe it's because we're in the recession/post-recession era, when self-marketing is often essential to staying afloat in the economy. I don't know. We seem to have forgotten those core bits.
It makes me sad.
That is something that is in all of our power to do.
Humans of any gender perceive women to be less of a potential threat, and therefore more friendly, than men. This is why onboard computers for US jet fighters, and the American version of Siri, have female-sounding voices. And it is why the employment of women for promotional purposes will no doubt continue: if you want to persuade someone to buy your product in a way that comes off as friendly, hiring an attractive and friendly-seeming woman to promote the product is an easy and effective choice to make.
"Bitching Betty" [1], the voice warning in aircraft such as the F-16 and F/A-18 was originally female because female pilots, especially in the military were relatively rare, although there were some female controllers. The female voice was more noticeable above the normal male pilots chatter on the radio. The wiki entry is somewhat inaccurate on the historical detail, so I included some info from F-16.net
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitching_Betty#Voice_gender [2] http://www.f-16.net/f-16_forum_viewtopic-t-1950-postdays-0-p...
Face it, the only real sol'n is to have really technical women working in our field because we can't go back. GDC has progressed, but as an industry it needs to keep progressing.
Maybe we can highlight booths that go above and beyond for the sake of the GDC? Like a best booth award selected based a set of criteria that includes having technical women available and knowledgeable. Then give them 5 mins to make a presentation.