Another conference season, another dumb sexist

Written by Piers Cawley on

Mum was often the only women [at British Leyland sales conferences]. In those days it was apparently common for presenters to slip the occasional naked lady into the slides “just to keep everyone awake”. When this happened, there’ be slightly embarrassed laughter and a few heads would turn to look at mum. Who ignored it. It doesn’t happen so often any more That was me writing about Women in Open Source in 2005.

Mum was often the only women [at British Leyland sales conferences]. In those days it was apparently common for presenters to slip the occasional naked lady into the slides “just to keep everyone awake”. When this happened, there’ be slightly embarrassed laughter and a few heads would turn to look at mum. Who ignored it. It doesn’t happen so often any more

That was me writing about Women in Open Source in 2005. This is Sarah Allen writing about Matt Aimonetti’s talk, “CouchDB + Ruby: Perform like a Pr0n star” which:

If he had left it [the dodgy images] at a few introductory jokes, I would be writing a very different post. Instead the porn references continued with images of scantily-clad women gratuitously splashed across technical diagrams and intro slides. As he got into code snippets, he inserted interstitial images every few slides (removed from the slides below). The first time it happened, he mentioned that he wanted to keep everyone’s attention.

Apparently, the difference between 80s truck salesmen and Matt’s audience is that at least 80s salesmen had the grace to look embarrassed.

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