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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.