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Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

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Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#171

Post by danielvinson »

onemorepassword wrote: post #27
chc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are PR people really 90% attractive young women? I would be very surprised to find that out.

I'm not talking about PR people, I'm talking about promotional staff usually hired on a temporary basis. Most of what they do is hand out leaflets and goodies, and persuade people to visit the company's booth were the companies actual PR/marketing/sales people are.

At every place i've worked, people in marketing/sales are significantly better looking than in engineering jobs (by that I mean a significant number of people are significantly more attractive). The easy way to explain this is that being attractive is enough to get your foot in the door for a sales position. It also is worth noting that they are, on average, making much less money than the engineers, so it would be a resonable hypothesis that they are less driven to learn because they are good looking, thus end up in an easier job.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#172

Post by jiggy2011 »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #167
jiggy2011 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men don't pay attention to supermodels, are you sure?

You're missing the point. Look up, horndog, the face, and the product pitch is up here.

Now I'm utterly confused.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#173

Post by hackernewbie »

I feel like there was a time when gender politics wasn't so abrasive in computing. It wasn't healthy, but it didn't make you constantly feel mired in some swamp of unsolvable problems. I preferred the swamp of (un)solvable problems that is computing.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#174

Post by AJ007 »

onemorepassword wrote: post #6

Seems like a hard problem to solve. 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…

Let me suggest that this is an impossible problem to solve.

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.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#175

Post by JulianMorrison »

theorique wrote: post #158
JulianMorrison wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that men pay attention to supermodel shaped women is (1) sexist (2) very mistaken. Sexist men pay horny attention to them. Horniness is a distraction from a product pitch. "I'm sorry, what did you say again? I was staring at your chest."

The idea that men pay attention to supermodel shaped women is (1) sexist (2) very mistaken. Do you know any men in real life? Unless you're just trolling, I find it hard to believe that you actually believe this.

Do you know how to distinguish attention from horndogging? Hint: attention is that which is paid to the subject of the conversation. If all you can remember afterwards is "bow chicka wow wow", you're doing it wrong.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#176

Post by sirclueless »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #162
waps wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk to her. After the first sentence you will know the difference.

Depends if you start with a technical question. Though that might be a good strategy to discourage "booth babes", just keep asking shit they can't answer.

That's not really good for the booth babes or the technical women. The booth babes all get thrown out of their depth repeatedly, while the technical women have to deal with every single conversation starting out by getting quizzed live to make sure they belong in the club, which sounds totally stressful.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#177

Post by jack-r-abbit »

Holy Shitsnacks! Did I really just read that? We can't fucking win.

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?

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#178

Post by mnicole »

monksy wrote: post #51

Can we talk about tech things instead of gender politics please? I'm just here for rampart, err, technical things.

The state of the industry punishes a sizable amount of people that want to talk about these types of things too. If you really care about tech, you'll care about issues that keep people out that otherwise could have had a profound impact on you.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#179

Post by NickNameNick »

pacaro wrote: post #161
__--__ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a game developer conference, not a game programming conference. there are a dozen non-technical jobs between "spokesperson" and "developer." Game designer, level designer, UI artist, CGI artist, Producer, QA - these are just a few jobs that do not qualify as technical positions. I suppose you could have everybody wear a badge that lists their job title, except not everybody is there representing a company. La…

Or just have a Geek Code[1] block on the badge... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code

Do people still use that? I only ever saw it on userfriendly profiles, and userfriendly has been limping along, very nearly dead for years now.

Re: Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse

#180

Post by stcredzero »

pacaro wrote: post #161
__--__ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a game developer conference, not a game programming conference. there are a dozen non-technical jobs between "spokesperson" and "developer." Game designer, level designer, UI artist, CGI artist, Producer, QA - these are just a few jobs that do not qualify as technical positions. I suppose you could have everybody wear a badge that lists their job title, except not everybody is there representing a company. La…

Or just have a Geek Code[1] block on the badge... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code

This is a meh protocol. It's not cleanly extensible and carries a lot of legacy.
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