Controversy in the geek community: porn in slides?

The geeks are restless. Some guy gave a presentation at some technical conference which has loads of pictures of scantily clad women in it. Some audience members got offended, a storm blew up in the blogosphere and members of this particular brand of technical geekiness left the community in outrage. You might wonder how idiotic the presenter would have to be to have dodgy pictures in his slides, but it is curious quirk of this sort of geekiness that they pride themselves on anti-coroporate culture and this guy appears to have confused anti-corporate culture with marginalising-women culture.

I have been looking into the issue of gender in computer science recently (Previous post (also here)) and so the reaction to this broo-ha-ha (sp?) is pretty interesting. For a good summary article, see http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html, written by Martin Fowler (a well respected writer of geekery). It has links to the slides themselves and various blog comments written by women in the industry. I would have been spitting mad if I had been one of the six female delegates in the audience.  It's pretty childish, and distracting from the technical point of the talk. It's bad enough walking into a seminar room and realising "I'm the only woman in the room again" (which has been my experience for many years) without having the difference between you and everyone else highlighted with a big yellow marker pen.

I can't imagine any of my colleagues being stupid enough to include such slides in their classes EVER, but the reactions to the slides by the community bring to light a seething mass of continuing problems faced by women in the industry. This the world which our graduates are going into, and hopefully the world they will change.

Martin Fowler ends his article with this aspiration: "How about a community where women are valued for their ability to program and not by the thickness of their skin?". At the moment, it seems that female students in CS departments do have to have a thick skin to get through their degrees. Or put it this way: you need to have a particular sort of personality to want to bother with putting up with it. After all, why should you bother if you can go and succeed in another field?

Comments

[Nicole]

I hadn't come across this explosion in the blogosphere, which does surprise me, to be honest, I would have thought it might have crossed over into some areas. Anyway, thanks for that, about to read the article. It does make me wonder what the reaction would be like if a female presenter used slides of some of the now readily available masses of perfectly chiselled and extremely handsome, scantily clad men, to a mostly male audience. I know it's a moot point, but a mental exercise that I find interesting.

BTW, it's "Brouhaha" and the etymology is unclear. :-)

[John Pirie]

Scantily clad women would certainly make some of the lectures more entertaining! Attendance would reach new heights- although revising the actual material may prove *difficult* what with all the distractions and all... :)

[Digitalkatie]

I keep meaning to email complaints to T3 and Stuff magazines. I just don't understand why there is perceived to be a 'need' for scantily clad women in presentations or magazines. Why alienate half of your potential audience??