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Learned this the hard way. Back when LinuxCon was still called LinuxCon, I made the mistake of making a beeline to the first "booth" I saw that was manned by a
by shawnee_ 15y ago
Learned this the hard way. Back when LinuxCon was still called LinuxCon, I made the mistake of making a beeline to the first "booth" I saw that was manned by a fellow female. I studied the setup, ascertained what kind of hardware being shown off by this particular vendor, and proceeded to inquire along the line of shop talk.
Although I don't remember exactly what I asked her, this was the gist of our exchange.
BB: "It's 2X faster!" (Vanna White, preening the chipset)
Me: "Faster than what?"
She appears panicked and quickly reads over the spec sheet behind her booth. Finally, after a minute, she looks up and says "It's just . . . faster."
Dear companies, giving the BBs a script isn't enough if they don't understand what the metrics on the script actually mean.
- dredmorbius 15y agoI also recall BSD staffing their booths (and the floor) with numerous women in red devil outfits, most of whom were quite technical. There's Linux Journal's Carlie Fairchild, who's intelligent, informed, and beautiful, and has left a slew of broken hearts in her wake through no fault of her own. There are a handful of other women in the Linux / Free Software community (it's overwhelmingly male), of whom Val Aurora and Erinn Clark come to mind (both have been involved in women/tech movements and between LinuxChix and Debian-Women there are numerous others). But yeah, at trade shows, particularly those geared at suits and sales, the ornamental variety tends to be more common. That said: I've found plenty of booths staffed by men who had little to no technical depth as well. To say nothing of, say, tech support lines.
- vacri 15y agoA friend of mine went to linux.conf.au and went along to one of the 'women in open source' conferences. At the start of the conference, the presenter was talking about how insidious sexism is in the tech industry and what an uphill battle it is to fight against it. She asked for the women in the room to raise their hands if they feel they've encountered sexism holding them back in their careers. My friend raised her hand - and in horror, the presenter recognised her as the woman she'd assumed was someone's partner back at the registration desk and tried to get to sign the partner's program (=daily things to do while your techy partner is doing the conference). Yes, the female anti-sexism speaker had herself assumed a female delegate was merely a hanger-on, solely because of her gender. It's both "ha ha" funny and disturbing funny, that sexism is so ingrained that someone who should absolutely know better still fell prey to it.
- atomicdog 15y agoWait, they have booth babes at Linux conventions? Those poor girls...