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

So I like the core of this idea, but since many gentlemen have been trained to not stare at a girl's boobs and make a great point of keeping their eyes up, I'm not sure if they'd read my shirt at all. It would probably have to be a different piece of clothing

From the article's author's words "if I could have substituted all the plain-clothes promoters for traditional booth babes, I would have done it in a heartbeat," I would say your understanding is correct.

What the author experienced is status-checking. Status-checking is a human activity. Here is a key component in this conversation. The author writes: "When trying to join lots of interesting conversations, I either had to be that asshole who casually drops her credentials, or deal with a few rounds of being told things were “complicated engineering stuff.”"

That is a problem ALL male developers face repeatedly. It's the problem of getting respect and status. It's the same as when two dogs meet in a park. You always have to fight to convince other people you're intelligent. I have three degrees and 20 years of working experience, yet I still have to compete with others to convince them I deserve the status and respect I do. Probably many of you who are reading this now will not be convinced. I am tested daily at my job. And it's got nothing to do with my gender. It's how living beings maintain order. We test each other. We sniff each other's butts. We keep track of who knows what they're doing and who is a pretender or out of date.

The author suggested that if all the non-skilled ladies were pigeon-holed as sexual objects, the male geeks would be prejudiced into adorning her with the status she deserves. This assumption is false. She would still have to compete. In tech circles and every other field from welding to law to nuclear physics to snowmobiling to kitesurfing, one faces significant social obstacles when meeting strangers to communicate one's experience and status levels. There is no shortcut (until you're famous). This is quite simply how human interaction works in competitive environments: people jockey for position. It's in our DNA throughout all of the mammalian kingdom. All of the blogs and tweets in the world won't change this. One notable exception is the "nice guys" who afford woman status before they deserve it. Many women are quite familiar with this behavior (and many of them are frustrated with it, because once they realize they are afforded status they haven't earned, they realize the person is unskilled at determining people's social status or just trying to appeal to their ego).

I hope every woman who thinks that the tech world will suddenly somehow deviate from 195 million years of evolution - who thinks that the tech world could possibly ever deviate from 195 million years of evolution - in order to accommodate her unfounded expectations takes this seriously and deeply to heart. No matter what, you're going to have to fight to convince other people that you know what you're talking about and that's got nothing to do with your gender, it's got to do with the fact that you're in a competitive social situation. That's they way nature created mammals, and eventually, the human being. I hope they all recognize this behavior in all of the other situations they take part in: going to the bank, playing on a team, fitting in with a church - all humans of all genders experience this. The "world of tech" is especially rife with it b/c it is especially competitive.

I'm not sure how such a boycott would even work, insist that all advertising uses ugly women?

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 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.

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. 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.