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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

#141

Post by jlgreco »

rada wrote: post #113
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…

Odds are, if you were recruiting for [promotional ] work 90% would be outgoing and attractive young women, just like recruiting programmers will get you 90% geeky white males. 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 thr…

Sure attractive males are cheaper to hire, but how does their ROR compare? I find it hard to believe they are not cheaper for a reason.

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

#142

Post by jmharvey »

JPKab wrote: post #103
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…

As a 31 year old male, here is my message to tech companies with products to sell: 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,…

The problem she described is a bit tougher to solve than simply saying, "don't hire booth babes." "[W]omen who are pretty but not models, dressed in normal street clothes" describes a pretty big percentage of the general population. Under her definition, "If you have 'booth babes' ..., I'm not going to buy your product" is essentially the same as saying "If you have women selling your product, I'm not going to buy it," which isn't exactly an enlightened position to take.

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.

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

#143

Post by rada »

zoidb wrote: post #128
rada wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odds are, if you were recruiting for [promotional ] work 90% would be outgoing and attractive young women, just like recruiting programmers will get you 90% geeky white males. 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 thr…

Think you are missing the point, the women in question are not "booth babes" but women dressed in street clothes doing promotional work. My gut tells me that the pool of applicants for these jobs skews attractive female.

And my several years of experience that involved hiring actors and models tell me that there is an endless supply of pretty people of either gender happy to wear a variety of outfits.

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

#144

Post by Macsenour »

dyno12345 wrote: post #64
Macsenour wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. I'm not happy with the situation, but it is what it is. I hired a very pretty, and smart, lady to promote my board game at a small convention. The crowd was HUGE when she was doing her job, and missing when I had a less attractive female friend doing the same thing.

Recalibrate your sarcasm detector

Agreed, I'm overdue for my 50,000 mile check up.

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

#145

Post by Kequc »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #89

Women were being very clearly, intentionally objectified with the "booth babe" thing. Now, rather than something obnoxious and sexually overt, we have something that I'd call far worse in its subtlety: Using women for exactly the same purpose but in a much more approachable, casual, and probably effectively interactive way. How did this happen? I seriously doubt it's because girls in bikinis stopped being effective.…

I think the major source of OPs discomfort at the conference was that she is surrounding herself with gamers. I'm just saying gamers spend time playing video games they could be spending interacting with other human beings, going out. Two things that many gamers significantly undervalue. So they get weird.

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.

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

#146

Post by rada »

jlgreco wrote: post #141
rada wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odds are, if you were recruiting for [promotional ] work 90% would be outgoing and attractive young women, just like recruiting programmers will get you 90% geeky white males. 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 thr…

Sure attractive males are cheaper to hire, but how does their ROR compare? I find it hard to believe they are not cheaper for a reason.

Oh I agree on the ROR. I was addressing the silly notion that there is anything remotely hard about finding he-babes to do promotional work. If you are going to say, screw any moral considerations, I am just going to do what's best for my bottom line, that's fine... it's the dishonesty that I find distasteful.

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

#147

Post by sargun »

saddestcatever wrote: post #10
sargun wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the benefit of this to the companies promoting their product?

People are generally attracted by attractive people.

I would rather have a talkative, witty, intelligent person at a vendor booth as opposed to an attractive, non-talkative, non-witty, non-intelligent man, but perhaps that's just me.

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

#148

Post by cs02rm0 »

ebiester wrote: post #87
gavinlynch wrote: post #38

I think I'm missing where the friction is in dropping your credentials? You don't have to storm in and say, "Do you know who I am??!". Isn't it easy and actually very polite to introduce yourself and what you do? "Hi I'm {Name}, This topic fascinates me as I'm also a developer..." And go from there?

The issue is that as a man, you don't have to. I know it seems weird, but as men we have a blind spot -- there's a lot of bullshit we have to deal with, but there's a lot of bullshit we don't have to deal with by the mere fact that we'r male. 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 ye…

Hmmn. It's just an odds game isn't it?

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.

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

#149

Post by bluehat »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #139
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…

I think the problem is her T-shirt/hoodie wasn't geeky enough. I could see male booth attendants having similar issues.

Wasn't at a booth, and I'm not very comfortable with the solution to this problem being "dress differently."

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.

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

#150

Post by bluehat »

gojomo wrote: post #66
[deleted] wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

You're addressing an issue -- 'booth babes' in 'sexualized' clothing -- different from the article and the comment to which you've replied. They're talking about a more subtle phenomenon, one which the PyCon policy doesn't address (and perhaps is too subtle and subjective to be addressed with any set policy). But maybe then, this isn't a 'problem' to be 'solved', just a thing that happens and should be understood, an…

In a perfect world I would like to see this problem solved, and would have posted a solution if I knew one. I am super eager to hear solutions.
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