10 ms·

Sexism in Tech: A Good Apology is Better than No Mistakes

72 points by mwetzler 14y ago

chunsaker 14y ago
This is a great synopsis. There are so many examples of how companies have handles sexist snafus well, compounding the gaffe like this is inexcusable.
- dkador 14y ago
  It's inexcusable from a PR standpoint. It's sad to think how much more love they could have received from the community.
sp332 14y ago
The women don't exactly look degraded. I can understand how people would be offended by this, but I don't see it being sexist. As they pointed out, both men and women were involved in putting together the booth, so it's not like this is universally offensive to women.
- crindy 14y ago
  The problem isn't that women are being degraded. The problem is that women are being presented as bodies that can help sell laptop batteries.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Women are bodies, among other things. They can pose for a display for tech junk without giving up other aspects of their humanity. In other words they are not reduced to being bodies, they are just choosing to express that facet of themselves. Tomorrow they'll show off some other aspect. Edited to add: I'm good friends with a model. She does stuff like this for fun.
    - king_jester 14y ago
      This is a point of contention for a lot of people. For myself, reduction of a women to their body in order to sell a product is objectification that appeals to a message that women are commodities. The majority of objectifying advertising has this implicit message built it. You might enjoy Killing Us Softly for more information about women and advertising (this link is trailer only, I'm afraid): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY
    - mwetzler 14y ago
      Hi there. I wrote the post and just wanted to let you and the models know that I fully support them and their right to do whatever kind of work they want to do. I don't see them as victims and I didn't write the article to be a voice for them. I wrote it for myself, as a woman in tech. It's awkward when women are used at a tech trade show to attract men to the booth. And it's offensive when a company like HyperMac calls us crazy for pointing it out.
      - sp332 14y ago
        That's not what I got from your article. I saw HyperMac responding to the people who said the display was degrading and dehumanizing, not to the ones who "passed it around the twitter-verse, rolling our eyes and having a good laugh." This part especially seemed odd: "What HyperMac failed to realize was that all the community wanted from them was acknowledgment and support." Really? Then why did the community boycott and attack them instead of asking for acknowledgement and support?
        rooshdi 14y ago
        Because they got an apathetic, arrogant, selfish, shitty response, that's why. You respond to people like shit, you get shit back. It's not rocket science.
        sp332 14y ago
        That is exactly my point. People started jumping all over HyperMac, and HyperMac dismissed the twitter pile-on as an uninformed mob.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    I'm not sure I like that explanation. If the laptop batteries were sold using women's brains, we'd be celebrating how far women's rights have come, despite completely ignoring that women are human and also have bodies. The real issue here seems to just be a puritanical view of nakedness/sexiness. Women most certainly do deal with problems in the workplace, but having the ability to choose to stand mostly naked to sell batteries doesn't seem like one of them.
    - mwetzler 14y ago
      I'm comfortable with nakedness and sexiness. I doubt the booth would have hit my radar at all if they'd included male models too. Honestly, this wouldn't be a blog post if the CEO had responded in a thoughtful way. It's his response that is most offensive.
      - randomdata 14y ago
        I appreciate the response. It was actually the original tweet that made me feel it was about the generally negative view of bodies, and not any kind of women's rights issue. It mentions appropriateness, which is usually associated with people, of all sexes, needing to covering up to be appropriate. Obviously the whole thing runs much deeper and I agree that things could be handled much more effectively.
      - sp332 14y ago
        >I doubt the booth would have hit my radar at all if they'd included male models too. I'm sorry but this was not at all clear from what you had written. Or any of the tweets you quoted. I tried to be pretty careful, thoughtful, and understanding but apparently I failed badly. After all this discussion I have no idea what your objection actually is. Sorry for wasting everyone's time, I wish there was something I could actually take away from this but I just feel defeated by this whole conversation.
        mwetzler 14y ago
        Thank you for reading and trying to understand. I really mean that. I hope some of my other comments will help explain it better. Here is a link to one of them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157470 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157470
- TheCapn 14y ago
  I understand how it can be offensive and why it is but in this particular situation I can't help but feel the publicity being provided to the company is doing them a favor. Sometimes these campaigns go a little overboard and become zealous when they aren't making much of a difference. I have never heard of Hyper-whatever. I have now. In 5 months time if I come across their name I may not remember the controversy but I will remember the brand, and they know it. Its a little different however if their core customer base was the ones in arms, not people like me who have never heard of them. Non-customers rallying doesn't do anything but spread their name about I feel.
  - mwetzler 14y ago
    I wrote the piece and I worry about this too :( My hope is that even if they get more brand awareness out of it, they'll at least think twice about their next booth.
- nollidge 14y ago
  Just because women were involved in creating something doesn't make it not sexist.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Well it's no guarantee, but does make it a lot less likely.
    - dkador 14y ago
      That's definitely not true.
      - sp332 14y ago
        Please be specific. I don't feel like guessing what you mean.
        jamesaguilar 14y ago
        I think he meant that what you said is not true. I.e. he is stating the inverse: "Having women involved in the creation of something does not have significant impact on whether it is sexist." Although I don't get how that needs to be clarified.
      - dkador 14y ago
        It's not true because men and women are both brought up in the same power structures. There are plenty of women who believe that women's rightful place is in the home, that buy into the notion of modern beauty, and that don't care about women's rights (aka abortion, rape, etc). That being said, I'd buy an argument that said women are more likely to be aware of these issues. Or even that women are less likely to be sexist. I suppose I took issue with your assertion that women are MUCH less likely to be sexist. I guess it's an argument of degrees.
        sp332 14y ago
        Thanks, and sorry for the snark but it's way too easy to just talk past each other about feminist issues in general. My memory is a bit fuzzy but from interviews I've read with models, most of them (male and female) are against the "power structures" you're talking about. The only model I'm friends with is definitely not the sort of girl who believes her place is in the home etc.
- Cowen 14y ago
  There are very few things that are "universally offensive." As nollidge accurately pointed out, just because women were involved doesn't mean it's not sexist. The fact is that this was widely considered offensive and unnecessary, and the CEOs response only made it worse. No one has the right not to be offended, but everyone has the right to speak out and not buy a product for whatever reasons they choose, which is exactly what happened. Personally, I don't have a problem with naked people in body paint as part of a display; it does everything you want a display to do, it catches eyes and it sticks in memory. But why did they only choose naked women? There are no painted male models in their staff photo from the event.[1] Was it decided that including naked men would somehow hurt the effectiveness of the display, and if so, why? Certainly there were willing male models, so it seems that HyperMac just steered clear of hiring men. The accusations of sexism (or more accurately, objectification) all springs from that, and the unwillingness of the CEO to even acknowledge that as a concern is honestly disturbing. [1] http://www.hyperblog.com/2013/01/thanks-for-an-amazing-ces-2013/ http://www.hyperblog.com/2013/01/thanks-for-an-amazing-ces-2...
  - sp332 14y ago
    The complaint in the article was that the display was degrading to the women. Including men in the display just would have degraded men as well as women. It's not a numbers game.
    - Cowen 14y ago
      That's nothing but blind speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that it would have been considered that way.
      - sp332 14y ago
        I don't follow. How would putting men in the same display change how degraded the women in the display were?
        Cowen 14y ago
        The argument isn't about whether or not they're being degraded, but whether women as a group are being objectified by the people who organized the display. That argument is significantly enhanced by the fact that women were the only "objects" that were on display, especially when women were far from the only "objects" that were appropriate for this display. There's nothing about HyperMac's products that figuratively or literally only applies to naked, painted women. Naked, painted men were just as appropriate as women, but they were completely avoided for reasons that are unknown to the public. Right now, the display is "naked women in body paint", but with men it would be "naked people in body paint." The gender neutrality of the display would exist in more than just a semantic sense, but also in a deeper sense that gender wasn't considered a factor when they were making this display. Right now, that's not how it looks at all. It looks like they only wanted naked women to be associated with HyperMac's products. And the CEO's comments do absolutely nothing to dissuade that viewpoint. Would people have still complained about objectification of women if there were men in the display too? Maybe. But they would have a much weaker case than they do now.
jlgreco 14y ago
Not to say that this is not an issue, but is this sexism in tech... or sexism in marketing?
- masklinn 14y ago
  Sexism in both?
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I don't deny that there is sexism in tech, but I can't figure out how this is an example of it just because the product being advertised is in tech. Is there sexism in the razor-blade industry because of how razor-blades are advertised? I can't imagine the people advertising razor-blades and the people manufacturing razor-blades have very much in common.
    - dkador 14y ago
      I don't think it does much good to try and differentiate between the industry making a product or service and the advertising industry that supports them. They don't exist without each other. For example, if Apple put out a sexist ad, you can bet people would talk about sexism in BOTH the tech industry and in the ad industry.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        Here is the issue I'm having. "Tech" is considered by the mainstream to be full of socially maladjusted overgrown boys who spend far too long in their mother's basement. They are cold and unemotional and they took engineering classes in college; perhaps one is the cause of the other. Sexism in programming teams made up primarily of this stereotype is a common topic here, and it is almost universally agreed that it is a major problem. So I guess it annoys me when a bunch of marketing people use sex in their advertising, as they do in every other industry imaginable, and we use it as an opportunity to flog tech some more. Where the exact people who made this decision selling umbrellas instead of hard-drives, would this be on HN? I don't think so.
DirtyCalvinist 14y ago
Interesting here is the automatic assumption that the company should agree with the criticism and apologize. Except for the gratuitous accusation of bad faith, the response is what one might expect from someone who did not agree with the offended's characterization of the situation. Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist, this is mostly a combination of condescending hectoring and whining. You have no right not to be offended. If you think that the display was sexist, it is incumbent on you to explain why and not act as though it is obvious to everyone under the sun.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Eh, I would say everyone has the right to feel however they wish; be it happy, sad, angry, or even offended. Now, you are not entitled to have other people care about your emotions, but that is rather a separate issue. If you feel they haven't adequately defended their reaction you are of course free to disagree, but your right to disagree should not be misconstrued as a lack of a right to be offended on their part.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  > Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist It should be obvious. I'm not sure, but I think that pretending not to know why people could be offended by this display in this day and age is just willful ignorance. Note: I'm not claiming that everyone has to agree that the display is offensive, but you must at least know why some people think it is. At any rate, it is not true that every article on gender politics should have to re-explain the basics to people who haven't been paying attention for the last few decades. > You have no right not to be offended. I think you mean, "You have no right to be offended," and you're wrong. Of course, it's awful hard to force people to stop offending you, but you absolutely have a right to be offended.
  - DirtyCalvinist 14y ago
    I mean you have no right to an offense-free existence. Otherwise, claiming offense amounts to a heckler's veto, and is chilling and oppressive. You can be offended, and proclaim your offense to your offender, but offense isn't enough to require a change of behavior without an ancillary moral imperative, such as "offending some women is wrong". On further thought, this post was probably written for an particular community, of which I am not a part, and on whose internal discourse I cannot make demands.
davidpayne11 14y ago
There is a very thin line between being a feminist and being an asshole. The problem with these women, who claim to be angered by women being treated as objects is that they don't identify the real problem. Women are attracted to men and men are attracted to women. This is basic nature and no one can change it. Using either to sell a product is not exactly sexism. For example, many deodorants use both male and female models to promote their products. Sexism in my definition would be when given the same opportunity, when one gender is being paid or treated better than another gender, that would be sexism, because someone is being treated unfair. What hypermac (the company in question) did was not wrong. They hired models who were for god's sake ready to do it. They were ready to accept money and stand nude on their product exhibit. It would have been unfair if they were treated unfair, or against their will, none of which had happened. The real problem about women being objectified is that women are ready to be objectified - either for money or for some other form of compromise. This is the real problem. As long as such women exist, the product makers and corporations would obviously use them. So, if you want this to stop, you have to revolt when someone from your own gender (male/female) is ready to represent your gender infront of a public audience and accept to be objectified for money. Don't go after the corporation that hired them, instead ask these people why they let them objectify you, on behalf of you/your gender in the first place. This is the real problem. I love the way that these rogue women go after men (and vice versa) only because they want an apology to feel superior and write a blog post about it. I think it must have been a great marketing campaign for HyperMac and the guy was right - These people deserved no apology for this particular event and this particular event alone (please don't generalize this conclusion). There's a great saying - Any publicity is good publicity. I hope these feminists realize this and stop fucking themselves up like this, publicly.
- saraid216 14y ago
  > The real problem about women being objectified is that women are ready to be objectified Root cause analysis, please. Five why's. You've answered one.
- wahnfrieden 14y ago
  Taking money for something does not mean that you're comfortable with it, that you're not being exploited (unknowingly or not), that what you did was right, that you understand the context of your actions, etc. Being a man or woman does not mean you speak for all men or women.
bitops 14y ago
Cue the usual slew of comments stating "I have a hard time seeing how this is sexism." Really, there's no need to post these types of stories on HN anymore. The discussion always goes the same way - lots of heated argument, no open discussion, no admission of vulnerability. Very few men are willing to question the power structure they've been brought up in. If you're born at the top, why bother to question the system? [EDIT: yeah, I'm grumpy about this today.] [Further edit: when I first posted this my karma was 1129 - let's see where it stands at the end of the day.]
- masklinn 14y ago
  > Further edit: when I first posted this my karma was 1129 - let's see where it stands at the end of the day. And you were doing so well until then…
  - dorkitude 14y ago
    I think he means "I think I'm going to get downvoted by a lot of privileged dudes", rather than "I'm gonna get mad points from this!"
    - Fargren 14y ago
      Both meanings would be equally unproductive. If your post deserves up or downvotes, let it stand on it's merit. Anything else is an attempt to game the system and adds nothing to the discussion.
      - jusben1369 14y ago
        I was ok with it. It's just the HN equivalent of "Yep, I know I'm going to get lambasted, egged, heckled but so be it bring it on" type of thing.
    - bitops 14y ago
      That was my meaning -- I'm not really attached to my karma score. I use it as a barometer of what kinds of feedback is valued on HN. I've been greatly disappointed by the amount of downvotes volleyed against "let's have a frank discussion about sexism" comments.
dorkitude 14y ago
Aaaand, cue the throng of straight, white, upper middle class males, who'll post a hundred aggressive comments like "stop being oversensitive".
- jwoah12 14y ago
  As opposed to these types of comments that attempt to preempt and invalidate the viewpoints of straight, white, upper middle class males because every single one of them obviously can't think objectively.
  - dorkitude 14y ago
    As one of those people myself, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that all straight white males are oppressors, but rather quite the opposite: that all or most oppressors of civil rights in this country appear to be straight white males.
    - jwoah12 14y ago
      Understood. Like you, I'm sure, I think I'm in the non-oppressor group. I often want to share my opinion in many of the posts about examples of tech industry sexism, but I never click the reply button. Even after taking a few minutes and thinking as logically and objectively as I can about the situation, I know that disagreeing that there was sexism involved will trigger an equally irrational mob response of downvoting my comment and accusing me of being sexist or being too privileged to even be able to recognize sexism.
    - steveklabnik 14y ago
      The point is that you're talking about an aggregate. It is impossible not to benefit (in aggregate!) from the patriarchy as a male. All straight white males are oppressors, but some of them attempt to recognize those advantages and not trample on others any more than they have to. But that doesn't mean they don't benefit, even passively. (P.S. I'm a straight white cis male.)
- zalzane 14y ago
slewis 14y ago
HyperMac's response was certainly accusatory, which is probably not good for anyone. But what if they had just said "We believe our display was not sexist, and we won't be changing anything." Is that any better than "We acknowledge that you think our booth was sexist, and we support anti-sexism in tech, but our display was not sexist and we're not going to change anything" ? The former at least seems honest, the latter condescending.
- dkador 14y ago
  I think both of those would be better than their actual response, which was accusatory and hostile.
  - slewis 14y ago
    Totally agree. But the article seems to say that you should always acknowledge and support, even if you disagree. And I think that could come off as dishonest in some cases.
    - dkador 14y ago
      That's a fair point. I think the article is assuming that, in these cases, the companies are in the wrong. This is actually interesting. I think there's probably a huge opportunity to communicate with your customers in this case. There's got to be a way to engage while respectfully disagreeing.
      - Kalium 14y ago
        That would depend greatly on who you are engaging with. If you're dealing with your customer base, there absolutely is. They can and should be engaged as customers. If you're dealing with a number of people who aren't your customers and were never likely to be, then you have a different problem as the presumed customer relationship isn't there. In this scenario you're dealing with people who don't care about your product and wouldn't buy anyway but mostly want to see you knuckle under. Engaging them as customers is a fundamentally misguided decision.
dizzystar 14y ago
Did the fact that all of the models are, in fact, the apparently objectified and degraded women pass everyone up? Look, I am totally against misogyny and sexism as much as the next guy, but I have a hard time taking these posts seriously on a few counts: 1- A large portion of the marketing industry is based around the "objectifying of women." Women should go out in droves and write long screeds against marketers (pigs?) instead of flooding the marketing companies with their resumes. 2- Stop buying clothes from the long list of fashion companies that are clearly objectifying women to an unrealistic standard of beauty. Oh, right, fashion schools aren't male dominated either. I love women and I have a lot of female (and male) friends, and I am just as bent out of shape about the way marketing is done as many other marketers (which I am), but you have to call out double-standards when you see them if you are ever going to have an intelligent debate about it. It's very easy to point out a male-dominated industry and call it all sexism, but please look at the very culture you not only built with your sisters-in-arms, but the culture you implicitly support with your dollars. As for the picture in question. Yeah, I don't see how it sells hard-drives either.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Re: your point 2. There is a huuuuuuge difference between women dressed in the clothes being marketed sending the message, "You could look like this," to other women, and women placed on pedestals like the product being marketed sending the message, "Buying this hard drive is like buying hot sexy naked me," to a group mainly comprised of men. Huuuuge difference. Maybe the former is not completely kosher, but the degree is so different that it makes zero sense to accuse someone of not calling out double standards when they mention the one and not the other. Also, it is really silly to tell activists that they aren't allowed to bother you until they have sufficiently bothered everyone else to your satisfaction. Basically all you've done is ask them to go away. It is morally equivalent to saying that people are not allowed to worry about healthcare or the homeless in their own country until the Africa problem is fixed. It's dumb. Also, plenty of feminists are complaining about the representation of women in fashion. So on top of being bad rhetoric, your objection is wrong on the facts. > I love women and I have a lot of female (and male) friends If there was a website called "x-ist-tropes.com", "I have X friends, my mom is an X" would be the #1 trope for almost any value of X. Just don't say it.
spitx 14y ago
GitHub is an exceptionally popular open-source community where any developer can find code for pretty much anything. But there's a problem—some of that code contains extremely offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic, language. A word of caution before you proceed, because these search results are very NSFW. You don't have to look hard for to find hundreds of results for controversial terms of every stripe. Simply inputting racial slurs, misogynistic words turns up code in several languages—Java, HTML, Python, Ruby, and so on —casually riddled with things like bitch, slut, whore, and worse. Source: http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexist-language-in-github-code http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexis... GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your code and your projects with the outside world. This kind of transparency obviously has its perks as well as its downsides—among the biggest is the fact that now we can see who's coding what. And we can see exactly how mundane racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other kinds of prejudice are in the coding world on a granular level. GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of panelists. Ruby coder Sean Handley took to GitHub to criticize the online community for bringing down the well -intentioned conference with "careless words." "Turns out, a lot of the prominent Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys," he stated. "Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided." Is it an overreaction to make an issue, likewise, out of the words being used by GitHub coders? Perhaps. But if anything, Morris argues that the issue strikes at the heart of nerd culture itself: The reason we’re seeing such vicious anti-equality bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation and other conference type stuff is because the very existence of societal inequalities (against women, racial minorities, gender/sexual minorities) threatens the whole idea that hackers got where they are because they are super-fucking-smart.… A lot of what we call luck boils down to us being in groups that don’t face discrimination and other problems. Source: http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-sexism-bigotry/ http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-se...
- deleted 14y ago
drakeandrews 14y ago
I'm surprised no-one has taken note of the assertion in the title and at the end of the article, that "a good apology is better than no mistakes". Yes sure not making stupid, sexist decisions and never get all the publicity. However when a [person/group/company (delete as appropriate)] does something bigoted, even the best apology still leaves them several notches below where they started beforehand.
Torgo 14y ago
This is a transparent promotion for the nonprofit mentioned in the article.
- mwetzler 14y ago
  It's not, but even if it was that wouldn't be a bad thing. They need as much support as they can get because they are doing very good work.
mwetzler 14y ago
Anybody know why this post instantly dropped from page 1 to page 4? Is it a bot or does someone really not want this conversation on the front page?
- sp332 14y ago
  If a story gets flagged a few times it drops off the front page. If it gets flagged more it's killed. I think this is all automated.
hoverkraft 14y ago
One point nobody seems to have touched on: men should be just as pissed off about the "booth babe" thing as women. A company using this tactic is basically telling the straight men at a conference to think with their dicks, not their brains. It's taking a product that could only exist through cultivating the higher functions of the human mind, and selling it by appealing to our basest lizard-brain instincts. It'd be like marketing a product by having two gladiators fighting to death in front of the booth. Impressive, but a step backwards for the species. And yes, it's totally degrading to women as well. Even if the models involved were willing/wanted to participate.

72 points by mwetzler 14y ago

This is a great synopsis. There are so many examples of how companies have handles sexist snafus well, compounding the gaffe like this is inexcusable.

dkador 14y ago
It's inexcusable from a PR standpoint. It's sad to think how much more love they could have received from the community.

sp332 14y ago

The women don't exactly look degraded. I can understand how people would be offended by this, but I don't see it being sexist. As they pointed out, both men and women were involved in putting together the booth, so it's not like this is universally offensive to women.

crindy 14y ago
The problem isn't that women are being degraded. The problem is that women are being presented as bodies that can help sell laptop batteries.
- sp332 14y ago
  Women are bodies, among other things. They can pose for a display for tech junk without giving up other aspects of their humanity. In other words they are not reduced to being bodies, they are just choosing to express that facet of themselves. Tomorrow they'll show off some other aspect. Edited to add: I'm good friends with a model. She does stuff like this for fun.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    This is a point of contention for a lot of people. For myself, reduction of a women to their body in order to sell a product is objectification that appeals to a message that women are commodities. The majority of objectifying advertising has this implicit message built it. You might enjoy Killing Us Softly for more information about women and advertising (this link is trailer only, I'm afraid): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY
  - mwetzler 14y ago
    Hi there. I wrote the post and just wanted to let you and the models know that I fully support them and their right to do whatever kind of work they want to do. I don't see them as victims and I didn't write the article to be a voice for them. I wrote it for myself, as a woman in tech. It's awkward when women are used at a tech trade show to attract men to the booth. And it's offensive when a company like HyperMac calls us crazy for pointing it out.
    - sp332 14y ago
      That's not what I got from your article. I saw HyperMac responding to the people who said the display was degrading and dehumanizing, not to the ones who "passed it around the twitter-verse, rolling our eyes and having a good laugh." This part especially seemed odd: "What HyperMac failed to realize was that all the community wanted from them was acknowledgment and support." Really? Then why did the community boycott and attack them instead of asking for acknowledgement and support?
      - rooshdi 14y ago
        Because they got an apathetic, arrogant, selfish, shitty response, that's why. You respond to people like shit, you get shit back. It's not rocket science.
        sp332 14y ago
        That is exactly my point. People started jumping all over HyperMac, and HyperMac dismissed the twitter pile-on as an uninformed mob.
- randomdata 14y ago
  I'm not sure I like that explanation. If the laptop batteries were sold using women's brains, we'd be celebrating how far women's rights have come, despite completely ignoring that women are human and also have bodies. The real issue here seems to just be a puritanical view of nakedness/sexiness. Women most certainly do deal with problems in the workplace, but having the ability to choose to stand mostly naked to sell batteries doesn't seem like one of them.
  - mwetzler 14y ago
    I'm comfortable with nakedness and sexiness. I doubt the booth would have hit my radar at all if they'd included male models too. Honestly, this wouldn't be a blog post if the CEO had responded in a thoughtful way. It's his response that is most offensive.
    - randomdata 14y ago
      I appreciate the response. It was actually the original tweet that made me feel it was about the generally negative view of bodies, and not any kind of women's rights issue. It mentions appropriateness, which is usually associated with people, of all sexes, needing to covering up to be appropriate. Obviously the whole thing runs much deeper and I agree that things could be handled much more effectively.
    - sp332 14y ago
      >I doubt the booth would have hit my radar at all if they'd included male models too. I'm sorry but this was not at all clear from what you had written. Or any of the tweets you quoted. I tried to be pretty careful, thoughtful, and understanding but apparently I failed badly. After all this discussion I have no idea what your objection actually is. Sorry for wasting everyone's time, I wish there was something I could actually take away from this but I just feel defeated by this whole conversation.
      - mwetzler 14y ago
        Thank you for reading and trying to understand. I really mean that. I hope some of my other comments will help explain it better. Here is a link to one of them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157470 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157470
TheCapn 14y ago
I understand how it can be offensive and why it is but in this particular situation I can't help but feel the publicity being provided to the company is doing them a favor. Sometimes these campaigns go a little overboard and become zealous when they aren't making much of a difference. I have never heard of Hyper-whatever. I have now. In 5 months time if I come across their name I may not remember the controversy but I will remember the brand, and they know it. Its a little different however if their core customer base was the ones in arms, not people like me who have never heard of them. Non-customers rallying doesn't do anything but spread their name about I feel.
- mwetzler 14y ago
  I wrote the piece and I worry about this too :( My hope is that even if they get more brand awareness out of it, they'll at least think twice about their next booth.
nollidge 14y ago
Just because women were involved in creating something doesn't make it not sexist.
- sp332 14y ago
  Well it's no guarantee, but does make it a lot less likely.
  - dkador 14y ago
    That's definitely not true.
    - sp332 14y ago
      Please be specific. I don't feel like guessing what you mean.
      - jamesaguilar 14y ago
        I think he meant that what you said is not true. I.e. he is stating the inverse: "Having women involved in the creation of something does not have significant impact on whether it is sexist." Although I don't get how that needs to be clarified.
    - dkador 14y ago
      It's not true because men and women are both brought up in the same power structures. There are plenty of women who believe that women's rightful place is in the home, that buy into the notion of modern beauty, and that don't care about women's rights (aka abortion, rape, etc). That being said, I'd buy an argument that said women are more likely to be aware of these issues. Or even that women are less likely to be sexist. I suppose I took issue with your assertion that women are MUCH less likely to be sexist. I guess it's an argument of degrees.
      - sp332 14y ago
        Thanks, and sorry for the snark but it's way too easy to just talk past each other about feminist issues in general. My memory is a bit fuzzy but from interviews I've read with models, most of them (male and female) are against the "power structures" you're talking about. The only model I'm friends with is definitely not the sort of girl who believes her place is in the home etc.
Cowen 14y ago
There are very few things that are "universally offensive." As nollidge accurately pointed out, just because women were involved doesn't mean it's not sexist. The fact is that this was widely considered offensive and unnecessary, and the CEOs response only made it worse. No one has the right not to be offended, but everyone has the right to speak out and not buy a product for whatever reasons they choose, which is exactly what happened. Personally, I don't have a problem with naked people in body paint as part of a display; it does everything you want a display to do, it catches eyes and it sticks in memory. But why did they only choose naked women? There are no painted male models in their staff photo from the event.[1] Was it decided that including naked men would somehow hurt the effectiveness of the display, and if so, why? Certainly there were willing male models, so it seems that HyperMac just steered clear of hiring men. The accusations of sexism (or more accurately, objectification) all springs from that, and the unwillingness of the CEO to even acknowledge that as a concern is honestly disturbing. [1] http://www.hyperblog.com/2013/01/thanks-for-an-amazing-ces-2013/ http://www.hyperblog.com/2013/01/thanks-for-an-amazing-ces-2...
- sp332 14y ago
  The complaint in the article was that the display was degrading to the women. Including men in the display just would have degraded men as well as women. It's not a numbers game.
  - Cowen 14y ago
    That's nothing but blind speculation. There is absolutely no evidence that it would have been considered that way.
    - sp332 14y ago
      I don't follow. How would putting men in the same display change how degraded the women in the display were?
      - Cowen 14y ago
        The argument isn't about whether or not they're being degraded, but whether women as a group are being objectified by the people who organized the display. That argument is significantly enhanced by the fact that women were the only "objects" that were on display, especially when women were far from the only "objects" that were appropriate for this display. There's nothing about HyperMac's products that figuratively or literally only applies to naked, painted women. Naked, painted men were just as appropriate as women, but they were completely avoided for reasons that are unknown to the public. Right now, the display is "naked women in body paint", but with men it would be "naked people in body paint." The gender neutrality of the display would exist in more than just a semantic sense, but also in a deeper sense that gender wasn't considered a factor when they were making this display. Right now, that's not how it looks at all. It looks like they only wanted naked women to be associated with HyperMac's products. And the CEO's comments do absolutely nothing to dissuade that viewpoint. Would people have still complained about objectification of women if there were men in the display too? Maybe. But they would have a much weaker case than they do now.

jlgreco 14y ago

Not to say that this is not an issue, but is this sexism in tech... or sexism in marketing?

masklinn 14y ago
Sexism in both?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I don't deny that there is sexism in tech, but I can't figure out how this is an example of it just because the product being advertised is in tech. Is there sexism in the razor-blade industry because of how razor-blades are advertised? I can't imagine the people advertising razor-blades and the people manufacturing razor-blades have very much in common.
  - dkador 14y ago
    I don't think it does much good to try and differentiate between the industry making a product or service and the advertising industry that supports them. They don't exist without each other. For example, if Apple put out a sexist ad, you can bet people would talk about sexism in BOTH the tech industry and in the ad industry.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Here is the issue I'm having. "Tech" is considered by the mainstream to be full of socially maladjusted overgrown boys who spend far too long in their mother's basement. They are cold and unemotional and they took engineering classes in college; perhaps one is the cause of the other. Sexism in programming teams made up primarily of this stereotype is a common topic here, and it is almost universally agreed that it is a major problem. So I guess it annoys me when a bunch of marketing people use sex in their advertising, as they do in every other industry imaginable, and we use it as an opportunity to flog tech some more. Where the exact people who made this decision selling umbrellas instead of hard-drives, would this be on HN? I don't think so.

DirtyCalvinist 14y ago

Interesting here is the automatic assumption that the company should agree with the criticism and apologize. Except for the gratuitous accusation of bad faith, the response is what one might expect from someone who did not agree with the offended's characterization of the situation. Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist, this is mostly a combination of condescending hectoring and whining. You have no right not to be offended. If you think that the display was sexist, it is incumbent on you to explain why and not act as though it is obvious to everyone under the sun.

jlgreco 14y ago
Eh, I would say everyone has the right to feel however they wish; be it happy, sad, angry, or even offended. Now, you are not entitled to have other people care about your emotions, but that is rather a separate issue. If you feel they haven't adequately defended their reaction you are of course free to disagree, but your right to disagree should not be misconstrued as a lack of a right to be offended on their part.
jamesaguilar 14y ago
> Rather than explain exactly why the display was sexist It should be obvious. I'm not sure, but I think that pretending not to know why people could be offended by this display in this day and age is just willful ignorance. Note: I'm not claiming that everyone has to agree that the display is offensive, but you must at least know why some people think it is. At any rate, it is not true that every article on gender politics should have to re-explain the basics to people who haven't been paying attention for the last few decades. > You have no right not to be offended. I think you mean, "You have no right to be offended," and you're wrong. Of course, it's awful hard to force people to stop offending you, but you absolutely have a right to be offended.
- DirtyCalvinist 14y ago
  I mean you have no right to an offense-free existence. Otherwise, claiming offense amounts to a heckler's veto, and is chilling and oppressive. You can be offended, and proclaim your offense to your offender, but offense isn't enough to require a change of behavior without an ancillary moral imperative, such as "offending some women is wrong". On further thought, this post was probably written for an particular community, of which I am not a part, and on whose internal discourse I cannot make demands.

davidpayne11 14y ago

There is a very thin line between being a feminist and being an asshole. The problem with these women, who claim to be angered by women being treated as objects is that they don't identify the real problem. Women are attracted to men and men are attracted to women. This is basic nature and no one can change it. Using either to sell a product is not exactly sexism. For example, many deodorants use both male and female models to promote their products. Sexism in my definition would be when given the same opportunity, when one gender is being paid or treated better than another gender, that would be sexism, because someone is being treated unfair. What hypermac (the company in question) did was not wrong. They hired models who were for god's sake ready to do it. They were ready to accept money and stand nude on their product exhibit. It would have been unfair if they were treated unfair, or against their will, none of which had happened. The real problem about women being objectified is that women are ready to be objectified - either for money or for some other form of compromise. This is the real problem. As long as such women exist, the product makers and corporations would obviously use them. So, if you want this to stop, you have to revolt when someone from your own gender (male/female) is ready to represent your gender infront of a public audience and accept to be objectified for money. Don't go after the corporation that hired them, instead ask these people why they let them objectify you, on behalf of you/your gender in the first place. This is the real problem. I love the way that these rogue women go after men (and vice versa) only because they want an apology to feel superior and write a blog post about it. I think it must have been a great marketing campaign for HyperMac and the guy was right - These people deserved no apology for this particular event and this particular event alone (please don't generalize this conclusion). There's a great saying - Any publicity is good publicity. I hope these feminists realize this and stop fucking themselves up like this, publicly.

saraid216 14y ago
> The real problem about women being objectified is that women are ready to be objectified Root cause analysis, please. Five why's. You've answered one.
wahnfrieden 14y ago
Taking money for something does not mean that you're comfortable with it, that you're not being exploited (unknowingly or not), that what you did was right, that you understand the context of your actions, etc. Being a man or woman does not mean you speak for all men or women.

bitops 14y ago

Cue the usual slew of comments stating "I have a hard time seeing how this is sexism." Really, there's no need to post these types of stories on HN anymore. The discussion always goes the same way - lots of heated argument, no open discussion, no admission of vulnerability. Very few men are willing to question the power structure they've been brought up in. If you're born at the top, why bother to question the system? [EDIT: yeah, I'm grumpy about this today.] [Further edit: when I first posted this my karma was 1129 - let's see where it stands at the end of the day.]

masklinn 14y ago
> Further edit: when I first posted this my karma was 1129 - let's see where it stands at the end of the day. And you were doing so well until then…
- dorkitude 14y ago
  I think he means "I think I'm going to get downvoted by a lot of privileged dudes", rather than "I'm gonna get mad points from this!"
  - Fargren 14y ago
    Both meanings would be equally unproductive. If your post deserves up or downvotes, let it stand on it's merit. Anything else is an attempt to game the system and adds nothing to the discussion.
    - jusben1369 14y ago
      I was ok with it. It's just the HN equivalent of "Yep, I know I'm going to get lambasted, egged, heckled but so be it bring it on" type of thing.
  - bitops 14y ago
    That was my meaning -- I'm not really attached to my karma score. I use it as a barometer of what kinds of feedback is valued on HN. I've been greatly disappointed by the amount of downvotes volleyed against "let's have a frank discussion about sexism" comments.

dorkitude 14y ago

Aaaand, cue the throng of straight, white, upper middle class males, who'll post a hundred aggressive comments like "stop being oversensitive".

jwoah12 14y ago
As opposed to these types of comments that attempt to preempt and invalidate the viewpoints of straight, white, upper middle class males because every single one of them obviously can't think objectively.
- dorkitude 14y ago
  As one of those people myself, I certainly didn't mean to suggest that all straight white males are oppressors, but rather quite the opposite: that all or most oppressors of civil rights in this country appear to be straight white males.
  - jwoah12 14y ago
    Understood. Like you, I'm sure, I think I'm in the non-oppressor group. I often want to share my opinion in many of the posts about examples of tech industry sexism, but I never click the reply button. Even after taking a few minutes and thinking as logically and objectively as I can about the situation, I know that disagreeing that there was sexism involved will trigger an equally irrational mob response of downvoting my comment and accusing me of being sexist or being too privileged to even be able to recognize sexism.
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    The point is that you're talking about an aggregate. It is impossible not to benefit (in aggregate!) from the patriarchy as a male. All straight white males are oppressors, but some of them attempt to recognize those advantages and not trample on others any more than they have to. But that doesn't mean they don't benefit, even passively. (P.S. I'm a straight white cis male.)
zalzane 14y ago

slewis 14y ago

HyperMac's response was certainly accusatory, which is probably not good for anyone. But what if they had just said "We believe our display was not sexist, and we won't be changing anything." Is that any better than "We acknowledge that you think our booth was sexist, and we support anti-sexism in tech, but our display was not sexist and we're not going to change anything" ? The former at least seems honest, the latter condescending.

dkador 14y ago
I think both of those would be better than their actual response, which was accusatory and hostile.
- slewis 14y ago
  Totally agree. But the article seems to say that you should always acknowledge and support, even if you disagree. And I think that could come off as dishonest in some cases.
  - dkador 14y ago
    That's a fair point. I think the article is assuming that, in these cases, the companies are in the wrong. This is actually interesting. I think there's probably a huge opportunity to communicate with your customers in this case. There's got to be a way to engage while respectfully disagreeing.
    - Kalium 14y ago
      That would depend greatly on who you are engaging with. If you're dealing with your customer base, there absolutely is. They can and should be engaged as customers. If you're dealing with a number of people who aren't your customers and were never likely to be, then you have a different problem as the presumed customer relationship isn't there. In this scenario you're dealing with people who don't care about your product and wouldn't buy anyway but mostly want to see you knuckle under. Engaging them as customers is a fundamentally misguided decision.

dizzystar 14y ago

Did the fact that all of the models are, in fact, the apparently objectified and degraded women pass everyone up? Look, I am totally against misogyny and sexism as much as the next guy, but I have a hard time taking these posts seriously on a few counts: 1- A large portion of the marketing industry is based around the "objectifying of women." Women should go out in droves and write long screeds against marketers (pigs?) instead of flooding the marketing companies with their resumes. 2- Stop buying clothes from the long list of fashion companies that are clearly objectifying women to an unrealistic standard of beauty. Oh, right, fashion schools aren't male dominated either. I love women and I have a lot of female (and male) friends, and I am just as bent out of shape about the way marketing is done as many other marketers (which I am), but you have to call out double-standards when you see them if you are ever going to have an intelligent debate about it. It's very easy to point out a male-dominated industry and call it all sexism, but please look at the very culture you not only built with your sisters-in-arms, but the culture you implicitly support with your dollars. As for the picture in question. Yeah, I don't see how it sells hard-drives either.

jamesaguilar 14y ago
Re: your point 2. There is a huuuuuuge difference between women dressed in the clothes being marketed sending the message, "You could look like this," to other women, and women placed on pedestals like the product being marketed sending the message, "Buying this hard drive is like buying hot sexy naked me," to a group mainly comprised of men. Huuuuge difference. Maybe the former is not completely kosher, but the degree is so different that it makes zero sense to accuse someone of not calling out double standards when they mention the one and not the other. Also, it is really silly to tell activists that they aren't allowed to bother you until they have sufficiently bothered everyone else to your satisfaction. Basically all you've done is ask them to go away. It is morally equivalent to saying that people are not allowed to worry about healthcare or the homeless in their own country until the Africa problem is fixed. It's dumb. Also, plenty of feminists are complaining about the representation of women in fashion. So on top of being bad rhetoric, your objection is wrong on the facts. > I love women and I have a lot of female (and male) friends If there was a website called "x-ist-tropes.com", "I have X friends, my mom is an X" would be the #1 trope for almost any value of X. Just don't say it.

spitx 14y ago

GitHub is an exceptionally popular open-source community where any developer can find code for pretty much anything. But there's a problem—some of that code contains extremely offensive racist, sexist, and homophobic, language. A word of caution before you proceed, because these search results are very NSFW. You don't have to look hard for to find hundreds of results for controversial terms of every stripe. Simply inputting racial slurs, misogynistic words turns up code in several languages—Java, HTML, Python, Ruby, and so on —casually riddled with things like bitch, slut, whore, and worse. Source: http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexist-language-in-github-code http://gizmodo.com/5980842/there-is-blatant-racist-and-sexis... GitHub is a platform geeks and techies love because it not only lets you manage projects but allows you to share your code and your projects with the outside world. This kind of transparency obviously has its perks as well as its downsides—among the biggest is the fact that now we can see who's coding what. And we can see exactly how mundane racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other kinds of prejudice are in the coding world on a granular level. GitHub sits in the center of an Open Source community that has been dealing with heated ongoing controversy over its lack of diversity. In November, BritRuby, a Manchester conference of Ruby on Rails coders, was canceled after outrage broke out online at its all-male lineup of panelists. Ruby coder Sean Handley took to GitHub to criticize the online community for bringing down the well -intentioned conference with "careless words." "Turns out, a lot of the prominent Rubyists are white guys and all of the ones who said they'd like to come were, indeed, white guys," he stated. "Making an issue out of that is, frankly, misguided." Is it an overreaction to make an issue, likewise, out of the words being used by GitHub coders? Perhaps. But if anything, Morris argues that the issue strikes at the heart of nerd culture itself: The reason we’re seeing such vicious anti-equality bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation and other conference type stuff is because the very existence of societal inequalities (against women, racial minorities, gender/sexual minorities) threatens the whole idea that hackers got where they are because they are super-fucking-smart.… A lot of what we call luck boils down to us being in groups that don’t face discrimination and other problems. Source: http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-sexism-bigotry/ http://www.dailydot.com/society/github-code-search-racism-se...

deleted 14y ago

drakeandrews 14y ago

I'm surprised no-one has taken note of the assertion in the title and at the end of the article, that "a good apology is better than no mistakes". Yes sure not making stupid, sexist decisions and never get all the publicity. However when a [person/group/company (delete as appropriate)] does something bigoted, even the best apology still leaves them several notches below where they started beforehand.

Torgo 14y ago

This is a transparent promotion for the nonprofit mentioned in the article.

mwetzler 14y ago
It's not, but even if it was that wouldn't be a bad thing. They need as much support as they can get because they are doing very good work.

mwetzler 14y ago

Anybody know why this post instantly dropped from page 1 to page 4? Is it a bot or does someone really not want this conversation on the front page?

sp332 14y ago
If a story gets flagged a few times it drops off the front page. If it gets flagged more it's killed. I think this is all automated.

hoverkraft 14y ago

One point nobody seems to have touched on: men should be just as pissed off about the "booth babe" thing as women. A company using this tactic is basically telling the straight men at a conference to think with their dicks, not their brains. It's taking a product that could only exist through cultivating the higher functions of the human mind, and selling it by appealing to our basest lizard-brain instincts. It'd be like marketing a product by having two gladiators fighting to death in front of the booth. Impressive, but a step backwards for the species. And yes, it's totally degrading to women as well. Even if the models involved were willing/wanted to participate.