Opinion | Women in tech: more female experts at conferences, less eye candy, please
- The ubiquity of attractive young women luring visitors to stalls and the dearth of female speakers at Asia’s largest cybersecurity conference in Taipei shows that the tech industry has a long way to go in recognising women’s contributions
Entering the halls of the Taipei International Conference Centre last month for Cybersec, Asia’s largest cybersecurity conference, I saw masses of men in jeans, flannel shirts and sports jackets, shuffling around with their conference tote bags, eyeing the displays across hundreds of stalls.
Amid the sea of masculinity, I was suddenly confronted by a woman who appeared to have been plucked from a cocktail party on a Saturday night, wearing a white strapless minidress and two-inch heels, carefully made up and immaculately coiffed, not a hair out of place.
As I got closer, I noticed she had company logos tattooed across her shoulders and arms. Walking around, I spotted others like her, all dressed similarly, showing more skin than one would expect in a professional setting such as this.
They were smiling and carrying business cards and billboards, offering pens, note books, plastic coffee cups and pamphlets. I asked a few of them about the products, and they smiled, bowed their heads and handed me over to a male colleague. I asked one of the models if her feet hurt. “I’m used to it,” she said, flashing me a winning smile.
The conference, at which over 200 companies were exhibiting cybersecurity products, attracts more than 8,000 people over three days. Do technology experts really need attractive women to sell something as unsexy as cybersecurity software? It appears they do. Sure, a friendly face never hurt. But what does it say about women’s place in the tech world, when we are only represented this way?