It’s amazing how fast news travels in a 2.0 world. Yahoo officially responded last night for the female dancers at Taiwan’s Hack Day. Unfortunately, this is after the author of that letter tweeted about how the Hack Girls “perked up the hackers.” Other news outlets carried the apology as well as further criticism.
What I found the most surprising was the dialogue I found on a thread from Hacker News. Someone posted Simon Willison’s post, and the comments are an interesting mix.
petewarden (who I’m assuming is a dude) wrote:
“Here’s my practical problem with this:
- We’re missing out on 50% of the people who could be good engineers. Programming is a really effective tool for improving our world, so any waste of talent is a Bad Thing.
- Whatever the moral arguments, accepting go-go dancers at events sucks as a way to attract women into our world.”
Another commenter named seldo noted:
“…from a personal perspective, it makes the assumption that all the male coders in the room are straight, which is in some ways an even more insidious assumption.
You can look at the room and say “okay, sure, there are no women at this event”. You can’t do that with sexuality — but people do anyway.
(I feel I should note that this unfortunate, embarrassing incident aside, Yahoo is an incredibly, almost ridiculously gay-friendly place to work)”
This last comment is a perspective that isn’t pointed out nearly enough.
At the end of the day – and despite the outrage – I consider the Hack Girls kerfuffle a win for women developers, and women’s acceptance in the tech space more broadly. Why? Because some men in that space aren’t standing by and condoning it.
Don’t get me wrong – we’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we reach any sort of parity in that sphere. But I find it enormously encouraging that men have publicly started to stand up for women in the tech space, and make it clear that they want more of us there with them. It’s a clear demonstration that there are feminist hackers out there, and those feminists don’t have a va-jay-jay to stand up for us.
Which is pretty cool.
I don’t know about you, when I think “Hackers” I think of my friends from school (hey, my nickname is “Nerdette” for crying out loud), or Angelina Jolie in a hockey jersey. Not strippers. Aren’t we at a time yet when this bullshit pairing of geeks and hussies is a thing of the past? Apparently, we aren’t.
If you rub the robot's belly, a go-go dancer jumps out.
Last week, Yahoo sponsored an annual event in Taiwan called Hack Day 2009. So a few things – first, you would think a global enterprise like Yahoo would be a little more discerning in their image, particularly at events they so heavily sponsor. Second, with a woman CEO named Carol Bartz who’s a breast cancer survivor, what is Corporate HQ’s reaction? According to this post by Simon Willison and a quick google search, nothing’s been said officially.
What’s even more interesting is that this is not some new PR blunder or an isolated event. I found someone’s flickr feed from the 2008 Open Hack Day with evidence of women participants here, here and here. Also, the go-go dancers/ strippers / scantily-clad-women were also there. But instead of furry boots, they wore hot pants overalls.
So I ask you, what would Carol do? I hope she and the rest of Yahoo figure out a way to exhibit some corporate leadership and stop allowing ridiculous “entertainment” to be a part of their annual event. Thinking about the situation reversed, it’s just not pretty.
Please be sure to make your voice heard – a lot of action has happened on twitter, there’s a petition to @yahoo to condemn what happened, and of course there’s the good, old fashioned method of calling their Media Relations office at (408) 349-3300.
Update: Via Twitter, Yahoo tweeted:
“Hack Girls from Y!’s Taiwan event don’t reflect our values. Was inappropriate, we regret offending anyone. We’ll ensure won’t happen again.”
I love the internets.
*Thanks to @womenwhotech for bringing this to my attention. The pic is a combo from Willison’s post and @womenwhotech’s Twitpic.
Hi everyone – I know. I’ve been lazy in updating this site. But I wanted to tell you about something I’m working on with some of my girlfriends – we’re mobilizing on twitter and elsewhere – and some are coming to DC – to make sure women have equal health care coverage at equal cost. We want to make sure that’s included in all the healthcare reform work.
Tomorrow Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is chairing a hearing begins at 10:30am in Dirksen SD-430. Women have been called to testify about their experiences with insurance companies and discrimination. But you know who else is showing up? Karen Ignani, spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans. So if you’re in the area and can come – please express your freedom of assembly and come to the hearing.
My day job beckons, but if you can spare your twitter profile pic, please feel free to use the one in this post – with thanks to the National Women’s Law Center and Rad Campaign.
I will update this post later tonight – if you are working on something similar please leave comments about it in this post. If you are promoting an action, please also leave it in the comments and I will tweet about it. Thanks again for all you do!
If you ever want me to do something, just tell me not to do it. It might be my stubborn nature or because I’m open to trying just about anything – especially if I think there’s any chance it might help someone out. But don’t ever tell me not to try.
That’s a pretty self-serving way to open a blog post, but I’m talking about the petition for Laura and Euna – to free these two journalists that are being detained and were just sentenced to 12 years in a prison in North Korea. Some folks at Care 2 started the petition for Laura and Euna, and I decided to push it around via Twitter.
What surprised immediately was two things – how much immediate hating I got from others on twitter, and how fast the petition got retweeted. (Thanks for those that did retweet the petition.)
Let me make something really clear: I know that this petition will not directly sway the North Korean government. That doesn’t mean its not a meaningful act. Continue Reading »
My great grandmother (according to family legend) was fond of saying “There’s no accounting for taste, as the old lady kissed the cow.” The first part of the saying it familiar, but the second part is just bizarre. It does, however, aptly describes how widely people’s individual preferences can be. That broad spectrum of taste is something I’ve been trying to examine as I process the Oklahoman Sotomayor cartoon. Continue Reading »
Some academics at the University of Florida published a study today that really burns my butt has some interesting findings.
Apparently Sarah Palin proves to the world that if you’re good-looking you can’t be smart, competent or be in executive political leadership. But hey, how can 133 college students be wrong, right? Even if it flies in the face of the scientific method.
I totally disagree with the findings of this study, because I’d like to offer:
Exhibit A: Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm
Exhibit B: Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (we miss you, lady!)
Exhibit C: Governor Ann Richards, who observed during her 1988 Democratic National Convention keynote address that “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” (I miss her a lot, too! Such sass!)
Exhibit D: Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland
Exhibit E: Benazir Bhutto. (we miss you, too, sister) the first elected woman to lead Pakistan and twice was their Prime Minister.
Exhibit F: Michelle Obama. She’s not elected but you better believe she’s got the full package and is highly influential.
And what about Exhibit G: Jennifer Brunner – currently Ohio’s Secretary of State? This woman is beautiful and courageous.
There are so many more!! We’ll update later.
Yeah. That one.
About.com posted a list today (in honor of March being Women’s History month) ranking the Top 100 Women of history. Madonna Ciccone is listed as #1, outranking her style icon Marilyn Monroe, and um, CLEOPATRA. You can find the author Jone Johnson Lewis’s ranking methodology here and she makes it clear through her clever italics that it’s based on internet searches. Well. Alrighty then. The Interwebs are never wrong, and this post is brought to you by the letters S, E and O.
So let’s think about this — modern poptart turned major business entertainment megastar outranks the sole leader of Egyptian Empire. (ps – where’s Queen Elizabeth? #22.) Where’s my gal Hillary Clinton? #15 which isn’t too bad.
I prefer Jill’s list to the About.com one, but hey, everyone’s a critic.
And more importantly – guess who didn’t make the list?
Authenticity is the strongest sunlight we can shine on fear. Love shines the brightest.
You might have seen it a few times already (I love that news travels in near-realtime now) but in case you didn’t – take a moment and look at the many faces of love, and then pass it on:
(Please go to the Courage Campaign and SIGN THE PETITION. 
Feministe and a bunch of other blogs and organizations posted about it, and if you have a blog, you should, too. Let love rule.
It really does feel a little bit like Groundhog Week. As much as women move forward, we seem to move back as well.
We started a weekly feature here at Not My Gal, asking readers to vote on their Gal/Not their Gal of the week, and the results are in:
We’ve decided to add a new weekly feature to NotMyGal — we’re going to start the Gal/NotGal of the week. A woman making you want to fling poo in their general direction? A woman that inspires you to keep your fists up? Let us know (and for purposes of inclusiveness – you can add your own, but we’re aiming more for people who’s been in the public eye for the last week.) Continue Reading »
