chargirlgenius (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chargirlgenius) wrote2008-09-05 12:39 pm
chargirlgenius) wrote2008-09-05 12:39 pm
A Sexism Post that’s NOT About Sarah Palin
If you think that sexism is dead in America, I’d like to tell you what I heard yesterday. I was sitting, working in a coffeeshop, and there were a couple of guys at the next table. The one was pitching to another an idea for event planning, telling him all of the services that they were going to provide. I was mildly amused, because the younger guy (the pitcher) was very enthusiastic, but the older fellow (the pitchee) was largely silent, and his body language made him look like he wanted to escape the conversation. Because of my amusement, I sat with my iPod headphones in, but the music turned off. (Ues, I’m bad).
As the younger guy is explaining how the day goes, he says, “And we’re going to have an attractive female at the door greeting attendees…”
I’m 95% certain that’s what he said. Had I been 100% I likely would have said something, but even with my iPod phones in, I don’t really doubt that he would have said that.
Not that it’s a surprise, but yes, female looks ARE more important than brains in getting some jobs in corporate America*. Lest I ever feel too confident in how far society has come, I’m quickly reminded how far we have yet to go.
(*I completely understand that for many jobs, a well-groomed appearance is a must, but I consider good grooming something that anybody can do, rather than inherently being “an attractive female.”)
As the younger guy is explaining how the day goes, he says, “And we’re going to have an attractive female at the door greeting attendees…”
I’m 95% certain that’s what he said. Had I been 100% I likely would have said something, but even with my iPod phones in, I don’t really doubt that he would have said that.
Not that it’s a surprise, but yes, female looks ARE more important than brains in getting some jobs in corporate America*. Lest I ever feel too confident in how far society has come, I’m quickly reminded how far we have yet to go.
(*I completely understand that for many jobs, a well-groomed appearance is a must, but I consider good grooming something that anybody can do, rather than inherently being “an attractive female.”)
Confession time...
True to my geek status, I was honestly more interested in bits, bytes, server capacity and latency than any of the booth babes (of whom there were many). This being 1990, the booth babe army did not yet include certain hot looking guys (that started happening post 1998, and they are still in the minority).
The sexiest thangs on the showroom floor were NeXT cubes, IBM AIX workstations (some running Nextstep as a demo), and some amazingly slick geographic workstations from Intergraph. Here's the confession part...
Most of the vendors had booth babes, and most of the both babes were completely clueless about the technology gadgets and servers and workstations they were pushing... That is factually true and thousands of attending engineers will back me up on this... However, it does not excuse my presumption that the exceptionally hot looking women pushing the Intergraph workstations were simply booth babes too.
In fact, Intergraph's booth was staffed by brilliant engineers; and they did not have a single clueless marketing type at the show at all.... The engineers just happened to be distractingly stunning, and gracious... they allowed me enough time to extract my foot, calf, knee and even thigh after I put them all in my own mouth asking for someone who could talk to me about the technical aspects of the Clipper chip and how CLIX (their OS) differed from AIX and HP-UX. The engineers were part of the team who'd just ported CLIX to Clipper from MIPS. Doh!
Guilty, but I learned a valuable lesson.
Re: Confession time...