This article is taking two points and conflating them together in a way that makes no sense at all:
Good Point: Marketers, who in this case are predominantly male, are using hyper-sexuality to promote their image and their ad and are being insensitive to women, thus abandoning 50% of the possible customer base. This is a stupid, of course.
Bad Point: Engineers are predominantly male because the marketers (an industry teaming with women) of this particular company are pigs.
The author of this article is saying that women are chased away from programming because some CEO and CMO, both presumably male, sat in the office and beat their brains out trying to conjure up a good image and brand strategy for the company. Is she saying that some lowly engineer, with no MBA + Marketing should have the power to stop this, and even if she (he even?) speaks up, there is anything that will stop it? What proof does the author have that all the engineers working at this place are males and that maybe a girl or two worked on the website and thought it was a good idea?
While I understand this article from an emotional stand-point, I am failing to understand it from a logical perspective.
Here are a few reasons that girls aren't attracted to engineering:
Boys receive Lego block and Lincoln Blocks.
Girls receive prefab Barbie Doll houses and cars.
Boys are told to play video games, which are all male-centric.
Girls... Shoots and Latters?
Girls are told that they shouldn't be good at math or science.
Boys are told they should be good at math or science.
This is all a much deeper cultural issue that sexuality is a veneer we use to hide the real issues. Marketing in general is lambasted for objectifying the female body, but that didn't stop droves of women going into marketing. Yeah, if sexuality was really the issue, then marketing would be 99% male also.
Good Point: Marketers, who in this case are predominantly male, are using hyper-sexuality to promote their image and their ad and are being insensitive to women, thus abandoning 50% of the possible customer base. This is a stupid, of course.
No, this is a bad point.
It is a point that at the least, needs a citation, re: the gender split of marketing professionals. Let me tell you, in my MBA program, the majority of marketing MBAs were women.
It is also a bad point because in this case, the person that came up with this ad is a WOMAN. Ya, a female not a male marketer.
Sorry, I missed the footnote. Well, then that is somewhat a bad point, but... it is ultimately up to the company to figure out who they are and what image they want to represent, and saying that a female marketer came up with the idea (Is Annie Dirk an iron-fist controller of all ideas from her company?) is still no excuse for the company's executive team to be mindless in their company's image.
We could also point fingers at the fashion industry as well. There is no other industry that I can think of that perpetually exploits women yet is full of women workers. Fashion schools aren't exactly male-dominant.
On the other hand, and I certainly don't know how this works, I don't think the CEO or President of many firms personally okay each ad in a campaign.
They give the marketing department a budget and say, there, go, spend that money.
So the interaction here is between a bunch of marketing people, we don't know the genders of many of them, we don't know what their relationship to tech is, we don't know what their relationship to the execs is.
>>They give the marketing department a budget and say, there, go, spend that money.
I don't know how this company works. I used to be a marketing director and I know it didn't work the way you describe at all. No manager is an island and everyone has to answer to everyone somewhere along the line.
I will argue that a CEO should be well-aware of what their company is and what it represents. I don't fault the company in the article for okaying the image portrayed in the ad, though. It is truly their own decision.
As a straight male I guess I'm the target of this type of advertising. But I don't find it even remotely sexy or titillating. This is a shallow, junior-high level male teen deuche bag perspective on sexuality. God damn it's sad and just plain gross.
What do ads like this say to me? What impression do I get of the company (Voco)? "Are you a dull, hyper-sexualized idiot? Do you treat women like trash are rarely get laid? If so you'll love Voco! Play with our V-spot, 'cuz that's the only action you're going to get!"
> Guys, this is why we don’t have more women in tech: It’s a cesspool. As long as we’re passing offensive schlock like this off as marketing for a major technology conference, we don’t deserve more women in tech
You're totally right. I can't think of any technology companies with engineers in their leadership. Further, leadership never approves ad campaigns. Ads get designed and run no matter what the CEO thinks.
The ad was created by a female marketing puke and her advertising team that put together this promotion.
It wasn't created by engineers, or physicists, or software developers, or occupations traditionally associated with tech. This could ad could have been about anything, because the woman in charge thinks that sex sells.
It was created by people that are much more closely related to journalism, Venture Beat, than it is to tech.
Easier to say if you're not the one getting 81 cents to the dollar.
That point has been debunked for just about forever now, including from Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor to Bill Clinton, and about as feminist friendly as a man could be.
The net net being that if there is a gender wage gap, it's on the order of 6 cents to the dollar, not 23 or 19 cents.
Do you have a better source? Not being snarky, but a couple of sentences with no cites isn't particularly compelling.
Especially when he starts by saying it's a rough estimate, and finishes by saying that the pay differential does exist, and is partly caused by bias and prejudice.
> Q: I’d be interested to know your thoughts on the feminisation of poverty and the male-female wage differential. How much of that is due to career choice?
> A: Rough estimate: About 50 percent of the differential has to do with different career choices made by women and men. Twenty-five percent involves greater time women spend on care-taking of children and elderly relatives. The other 25 percent is due to bias and prejudice in the labor market.
There are a wide variety of takes, pro and con, on the gender wage gap. It's clearly very political, and so for every report X you can easily find !X out there.
It's also useful to know how this wage gap is calculated. So as you search, see if you can find any source that says this is an apples to apples comparison. Men of some age and schooling in some field compared to women of the same age and schooling in the same field. Because the 77 cents number, the 81 cents number really seems to from adding up all wages in all fields from men and comparing them to all wages in all fields from women.
Here is a report from CONSAD commissioned, I believe from the Labor Department under GWB, removed from gov't websites when President Obama came into office, and if you google it, a report criticized by many on the left, frequently and loudly.
What is interesting is that, I believe, all of these supposedly conservative reports and analysis support what Robert Reich is saying (and/or vice versa.)
Well, the first recorded chemist according to Wikipedia on Perfume is female, but almost every other citing after this is male. Is there a reason your sons could not enter the cologne industry as highly capable chemists?
Consumer electronics are? I guess agriculture, civil engineering, manufacturing, law, etc can now be free to sexy it up when they are less important and have less attention in media echo chambers dedicated to those areas.
This product did not work at all once I bought it. I
contacted the company to get a refund. The customer
service person swore at me, called me an idiot, and
told me to "get lost." Enraged, I found the contact
information for the CEO. I appealed to the CEO that
the product was non-functional. The CEO replied by
email with a pornographic picture with the caption,
"GO F**K YOURSELF!"
I bet that company is going to rolling in the money due to all of the brand-recognition that they just got, right? </sarcasm>
> Maybe the beholder doesn't think of women's body parts as playthings.
Isn't that a valid use for many body parts, and a primary use for a few, regardless of gender? I don't think this marketing, by displaying legs and lips in the context of sensuality, is implying that other uses for legs (like running) or lips (like playing the harmonica) are any less valid.
Is the issue the desire to have sex with women itself, or the choice to market specifically to people that desire to have sex with women? I don't see anything wrong with either.
And does it really hint to heterosexual women that they aren't a valid user of the technology? I certainly don't automatically assume that I'm not a valid user of a product when I see marketing directed at a demographic of which I'm not a member. I've bought laptops and tablets despite them being primarily shown in ads with college students or teenagers.
I am tempted to think that the author has a specific problem with sexuality in marketing, not simply marketing that targets a specific demographic.
> I certainly don't automatically assume that I'm not a valid user of a product when I see marketing directed at a demographic of which I'm not a member.
Did you have an Easy Bake Oven as a kid?
> I don't see anything wrong with either.
I know, that's part of the problem we've got, here.
There's lots of things I didn't have as a kid, including numerous toys marketed at both genders. The fact that males usually don't buy every single product that has ever been marketed to females isn't a very useful piece of evidence.
You just claimed that part of the problem is my belief that marketing specifically to people that desire to have sex with women is not bad. I find that claim incomprehensible, and I am very curious at your reasoning behind it.
Of course if they get a net 10% bump in attention from male software engineers by this ad and a 99% drop in attention from female software engineers, then they probably net quite positive on this. Thus the male dominated industry self perpetuates.
Good Point: Marketers, who in this case are predominantly male, are using hyper-sexuality to promote their image and their ad and are being insensitive to women, thus abandoning 50% of the possible customer base. This is a stupid, of course.
Bad Point: Engineers are predominantly male because the marketers (an industry teaming with women) of this particular company are pigs.
The author of this article is saying that women are chased away from programming because some CEO and CMO, both presumably male, sat in the office and beat their brains out trying to conjure up a good image and brand strategy for the company. Is she saying that some lowly engineer, with no MBA + Marketing should have the power to stop this, and even if she (he even?) speaks up, there is anything that will stop it? What proof does the author have that all the engineers working at this place are males and that maybe a girl or two worked on the website and thought it was a good idea?
While I understand this article from an emotional stand-point, I am failing to understand it from a logical perspective.
Here are a few reasons that girls aren't attracted to engineering:
Boys receive Lego block and Lincoln Blocks. Girls receive prefab Barbie Doll houses and cars.
Boys are told to play video games, which are all male-centric. Girls... Shoots and Latters?
Girls are told that they shouldn't be good at math or science. Boys are told they should be good at math or science.
This is all a much deeper cultural issue that sexuality is a veneer we use to hide the real issues. Marketing in general is lambasted for objectifying the female body, but that didn't stop droves of women going into marketing. Yeah, if sexuality was really the issue, then marketing would be 99% male also.