I think it’s more a matter of you not looking professional. The age old addage about judging books by their cover is wrong. Not only can you judge a book by it’s cover… it’s done regularly by all.
If you show up at a conference being represented by a bunch of people you hired off the street, be they women in bikinis or hobos in hoodies… the results are the same. You look completely unprofessional. And that’s not something a potential customer or investor is going to see as attractive.
Businesses don’t see fat bottomed people. They see bottom lines.
No joke, when I was at GDC Next a couple months ago at the LA Convention Center, a company had a booth babe in a spandex bodysuit to show off their live mo-cap technology. A guy standing next to me said, “Do you come with the product?”
I made it known to everybody in the vicinity that a Simpsons joke from nearly 20 years ago is still relevant. Everybody, including the booth babe cringed.
Let’s replace the booth babes with prisoners in orange jumpsuits; there is a sign posted that notes the prisoners receive no pay or other compensation for their appearance.
Let’s replace the booth babes with children dressed in rags, shackled to the table; there is a sign posted that notes that attendees should ignore their pleas for food or water.
How is visiting both booths, irrespective of the products, progressive?
Are you using the word progressive to mean “If I close my eyes I can pretend it doesn’t exist” ?
In the real world, no. Go back and look at http://boingboing.net/2013/11/06/understanding-spurious-correla.html and think about what it means concerning employees at such a booth. If one of the women is really good looking and wears a short skirt, it’s likely that she was hired as eye candy. Now maybe you can argue that we have a moral obligation to ignore the negative correlation between looks and brains that this situation has created, but I don’t think you can really say that it’s irrational to adjust our expectations.
While I don’t doubt his results, I feel uneasy about crowing about them. It reminds me of the tacit belief a lot of white people seem to hold that when it comes to balancing personal liberties against reducing racist acts (hate speech, discriminatory practices, etc.) the sweet spot must be allowing as much freedom as possible up to the point where they, white people, might be bothered by the allowed racism. Why isn’t it enough to say that booth babes are sexist as hell and often make women uncomfortable? Why do we have to justify criticisms with “and they don’t work to attract men”? “You should do the right thing because it will help your bottom line” may be a convincing line of argument to corporate entities, but we shouldn’t think of it as the be-all and end-all of discussion.
I don’t really get the whole up in arms about women being judged because they are sexy. I was recently out of work and brushing up on my job interview skillz. At no point did I read that it was a good idea to come to a job interview in my skank outfit. Men either - they were supposed to look polished, professional, no facial hair. To me a trade show, you dress like you would for a job interview. I assume that someone who is wearing a slinky dress has no idea about a product because she doesn’t even know that a professional business person doesn’t skank up in a business environment, not because I think skanky = dumb.
I think he’s very deliberately taking a dollars-and-cents stance to get through to his audience. Of course there is a lot more to say about it, but I think he basically wanted to argue: ‘even if you’re a troglodyte who doesn’t give a shit about feminism, you still have an excellent reason to not behave this way’.
I think part of the problem is that I haven’t been to any conferences that had “booth babes” that dressed anything like the ones in the article.
At O’Reilly’s Strata for instance which should be very similar to the SAP conference referenced in the article (same kind of attendees, SAP even has a booth), there were probably some attractive women, but none that fits the stereotype of what I hear goes on at car shows or game conferences. A quick image search for “SAP TechEd booth” doesn’t seem to turn up anything that matches a “booth babe” unless you consider this young woman to be a booth babe:
(note: this woman could for all I know work for BayForce. I just took one of the few pictures I could find with a woman in it holding up swag.)
This makes me question the entire article. After all, if he staffed one booth with models that look like the stereotype of a booth babe at a conference that doesn’t appear to “do” booth babes, then he stacked the deck in his a/b test. If he staffed it with women like the above and they turned up less interest than considerably older women, then that’s either ageist or sexist (take your pick).
Sadly, the author doesn’t seem to have his own pictures. This one is actually from a modelling agency for SAP TechEd:
Which is a far cry from the girls in hot pants in the article.
Actually you are bolstering Aloisius’s point. The fact that a younger, knowledgeable, professionally dressed female employee will be dismissed as “eye candy” is sexism, and it sucks. It causes the ideas and contributions of younger women to be devalued constantly, and honestly it NEVER stops hurting when some one causally refers to you as a token. Never (this goes for other minorities too).
That being said, I think there are two separate issues here. The “booth babe” phenomenon is about hiring non-product-knowledgeable models purely to “draw in” customers by being sexy. While I think the study could have had room for younger professionally dressed women as point of comparison, this does do a good job of suggesting that opposed to approaching technology with the same tactics used for advertising Valvoline at races, it’s time to consider that the technology consumers with the biggest buying power are more interested in professional appearance and clearly communicated high quality information about the product. It really shouldn’t be a surprise, actually. You have two very different kinds of products here. One has a simple purpose and lodging the brand in people’s mind is the most important part of advertising, in the other you have typically a highly specialized product that the buyer will need to understand some what to develop interest in.
We’ve done over a hundred design/trade shows since 1990: NYC, Chicago, Las Vegas, Hawaii, Frankfurt and London. This “Booth Babe” form of attention getting has been and will continue to appear desperate and cheesy to the professional buyers.
For the serious buyer or specifier ( be they female or male) the product itself is the ONLY thing of importance and a seasoned buyer will spot that product from a mile away. Even a super expensive and extravagant booth display takes a back seat to the quality or innovation of the product being offered. This fact is common knowledge among seasoned attendees.
It’s not about sex or sexism. It’s about actual sales.
I would venture to hypothesize that men don’t like booth babes in a gender-mixed audience. In other words, it’s inappropriate for them to enjoy the sight of scantily clad women who have nothing to do with the products now that women are attending trade shows in large numbers.
I recently attended the International Motorcycle Show and I felt very awkward looking at bikes that girls who would be my daughter’s age were I to have children were draped upon. So I actually steered away from those exhibits.
If exhibitors want to tap into the power of sexual attraction they should have their booth workers be really attractive people–men and women–dressed in normal attire, and be knowledgeable and actual users of the products. So again speaking from experience, while I skipped the girls who were showing flesh, there was a really cute nerd girl selling awesome motorcycle maps and atlases. I dropped my money there.
The thing about the whole “booth babe” phenomenon, is even though we tend to associate it with the dot-com era and socially awkward geeks ogling them, is it is much older than that. They were typical in sales conventions in the 1960s as well, not surprisingly as it was the same era where flight attendants (or “stewardesses” as they were known) were supposed to be “sexy” more than competent. But society has moved out of this Mad Men era mindset in other ways – the “three martini lunch” is no longer a thing either. It’s time for this out-of-date custom to go away too.
