Both men and women pictured,
People only bitching about sexism against women. (See icon)
'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations
An IT jobs site in the UK has been criticised for running an ad campaign featuring women in languorous poses with the strapline “hot tech talent”. Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion …
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:21 GMT 2460 Something
Every one of the men pictured were topless and in underwear. This is the worst kind of sexism as all the women are fully clothed! How degenerative of Dice to exclude women's equality in such a shameful and disrespectful manner. Don't they know that 'girls just wanna have fun' too?
If your going to run an article about anti-women sexism in IT, don't pick a subject matter that isn't. Political correctness over-drive. I had a quick look through but not one of the tweeters (twit's?) you highlighted were also offended at (or even mentioned) the adverts that featured men. One suspects that they saw one advert out of context and the bandwagon a cometh with plenty of room for them all.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2016 15:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
sexism is often a selective blindness..
in that the eternal victims don't see the balance that would remove their special status.
I guess they missed the giant billboards in the Bay Area that had some (presumably) naked tatted MALE holding a large strategically placed snake. Or the ones with guys in boxers. In fact, a quick Google showed originally a lot of butthurt about the "reverse sexism" and the absolutely accurate prediction of how, if the genders were reversed, suddenly THEN there would be "official" outrage.
got at least 3 links in the first page of older complaints. None in the "big" tech media so far. Not as big a blowup as a couple schoolgirls created among the SXSJW crowd within days of it's reveal.
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Monday 21st March 2016 11:51 GMT TheProf
Image this
A quick look at the images Google found and they are almost all of men.
Is this another case of 'women being feeling slightly #offended' being a news-worthy thing?
I read a headline at the weekend that claimed ballet is sexist because there are more male choreographers than women. A quick read through of the article revealed that ballet used to be dominated by women choreographers but that isn't the case now. So obviously not a case of pendulum swings or roundabouts or a natural fluctuation but sexism. FFS!
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:03 GMT Hollerithevo
Re: Image this
Dear Prof, 'for example' is not proof.
I haven't seen any ads showing blokes. I saw th ad with a woman and just sighed. If you want to appeal to women to join the tech industry, why do you think this would attract them to the profession? Again, why would showing a sizzling hot stud attract men to the industry? Now, if you should men and women with their pockets loaded with dosh, looking happy and successful, that might work.
The problem lies with advertising agencies, where the Creatives are guys in their 20s and think that the world looks to everyone the way it looks to them.
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Image this
I haven't seen any ads showing blokes
You haven't been looking very hard. e.g. http://uk.dice.com/technews/category/it-news/
The series of ads look quite tongue in cheek, since the people aren't exactly supermodels and the poses seem deliberately a little ironic.
And whilst all the men are only wearing underwear, all the women are fully clothed. You see far more female flesh if you go to a pub on a Friday night. But I guess some people just go out of their way to be offended.
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Monday 21st March 2016 14:32 GMT John Robson
Re: Image this
"I haven't seen any ads showing blokes. I saw th ad with a woman and just sighed. If you want to appeal to women to join the tech industry, why do you think this would attract them to the profession? Again, why would showing a sizzling hot stud attract men to the industry? Now, if you should men and women with their pockets loaded with dosh, looking happy and successful, that might work."
Maybe the women are there to attract the men and viceversa?
Maybe not everyone is motivated purely by money?
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Monday 21st March 2016 23:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Image this
Maybe the women are there to attract the men and viceversa?
Many magazines targeted at women have a picture of a pretty, often overtly sexualized, woman on the cover. e.g. http://www.allyoucanread.com/top-10-womens-magazines/
The reason that even the very sexual images encourage women to buy the magazines, rather than repelling them, is that many women will look at the image and think "I want to be more like that woman - successful, confident, healthy, desirable etc".
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dice is looking to take full advantage of the Protein World Effect, and it looks like they've succeeded: the legions of the professionally offended - who arrogantly feel it vitally important the internet is fully aware of their latest 'triggered hysteria' - are giving Dice publicity they'd never otherwise had. Surely money well spent by Dice.
So to date: Dice 1, The Uber-Offended 0.
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:17 GMT 0laf
'Dice has claimed: "The models in our #HotTechTalent ads are all real tech pros working in their specified roles!"'
What? Lying on the floor?
That doesn't seem too technical, many times after a hard technical discussion in the pub I could find myself lying on the floor looking professional. I think it smacks of blatant sexism that you chose a women to lie on the floor when a bloke can do that just as well.
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Monday 21st March 2016 19:18 GMT dehildum
I gather you have never had to sort out the issues with the machine under your desk, or in the bottom slot on the rack in the far corner behind the pile of leftover equipment that should never have been left in the server room, in order to do the demo called up with five minutes notice by a sales droid for that "strategic" customer the droid knew was coming that day for a demo for three and a half weeks, but never bothered to mention to you. I'll not waste my engineers' time setting up a useless demo because the droid is a moron, they have important work to do. I set the silly thing up myself, even if it messes up my pointy hair - then have a discussion with the Sales Director about demonstration scheduling and the Ops manager about the state of the server room.
Then again, as a manager, I suppose I am not "hot tech talent," even if I am lying on the floor trying to get that cable connected….
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:59 GMT TRT
Where did I see that thing this weekend?
The one which was a "scientific" study that showed that the ratio of male to female workers in that field affected the pay independently of a gender bias in pay? It cited some example of a time (the 60s-70s) when computer programming positions were dominated by women (presumably because of their keyboard skills) and the pay was pitiful until it became male dominated in the late 70s - early 80s when it shot up. And there was some corollary in the teaching profession as well.
My memory's going. I wish I could remember where I saw it. I'd link to it.
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Monday 21st March 2016 14:13 GMT MR J
Re: Where did I see that thing this weekend?
Are you sure the pay was not bad in the 60's because it was built by women?
I would have thought the sheer lack of global sales would have something to do with it.
From my limited knowledge of those years, I don't think there was many people getting paid well until at least the early 80's.
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Monday 21st March 2016 12:59 GMT FuzzyWuzzys
What's wrong with being a "nerd"?!
"counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds". "
Why?! I'm proud to be a "nerd" and/or "geek", have been since I was about 8 years old almost 40 years ago now. My daughter gets called a "gerd" and "neek" at school 'cos she'd rather spend her lunch hour reading in the library, and she loves it when people call her one.
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Monday 21st March 2016 13:03 GMT WarwickHunt69
Not my favourite episode.
Dice shouldn't back down: they publish a charity calendar featuring 12 of the hottest geeks in their company to raise money for cross-eyed people, so that the photographer can get off with that girl from the fourth floor he fancies.
He won't be able to get it up though, because he won't be able to get the images of those half-naked geeks out of his head.
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Monday 21st March 2016 14:21 GMT MonsieurTM
Outraged & Disgusted from London!
This set of adverts is extremely pant-ist: I feel that boxers and briefs are hugely under-represented & why not have tangas and jock-straps for the trains running after the watershed? Surely in these enlightened times, women should be equally represented in suitably under-clad states too?!!! Mary Pankhurst chained herself to the Houses of Parliament for female equality, you know!
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Monday 21st March 2016 15:15 GMT Franco
I'm not going to criticise anyone's right to be offended by this, or to ignore it completely.
I WILL say that having been out of work for a bit last year and having perused the IT Job Board (as was), after one look at their site clickbait is the only way they would ever get any repeat visits. There were jobs on there that had been filled months previously but never removed from the site.
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Monday 21st March 2016 16:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
...Have just re-branded themselves:. VICE...
Seriously, DICE is still going? I remember using them for contracting work a couple of times last decade. I thought they'd been bought out long ago by monster or some other giant sized ego!
I remember doing a test (had lots of time waiting for call-backs, post dot-com-meltdown). I set up dozens of throwaway email a/c's with slightly altered Resumes / CVs... Then waited to see which one would shaft me the most privacy-wise (sell my info w/o permission & spam the life out of me).
DICE were no saints but weren’t the worst... Monster and related spin-offs with the word 'talent' in the name were 'the beast'. They just ignored privacy / access preferences, and turned around and sold your info as a lucrative shop mailing list... Welcome to the world of online recruiters - day one!
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Monday 21st March 2016 17:25 GMT Tatsky
I can't help thinking about the parallels between this marketing campaign and the #ILookLikeAnEngineer thing that has been going around. That started off the back of a female software engineer being photographed by her firm for a PR piece. As she was a fairly attractive, young lady there was some criticism that "she can't be an engineer" and "no way, she is too pretty to be an engineer". So she started this hash tag, and it's been going for quite a while now. So seemingly if you say someone is too pretty to be an engineer you are sexist, and if you carry out marketing on the premise that engineers can be quite hot you are sexist... it seems that anything we do is sexist.
Or maybe some people are just too sensitive. Who gives a shit what genitals someone has, as long as their DBs are normalised and their unit tests are sexy.
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Tuesday 22nd March 2016 16:54 GMT wookie78
I'm in IT and female. This gets annoying.. just because the ads are stupid all around and a girl complains, doesn't mean she's some raging angry feminist. Thanks to the media for portraying everyone this way. I think the guy ads are just as stupid. Do they make ads like this about accountants? (That'd be funny, actually) ;)
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Wednesday 23rd March 2016 09:29 GMT codejunky
@wookie78
"just because the ads are stupid all around and a girl complains, doesn't mean she's some raging angry feminist."
I think its probably this line- "why do you need to imply that women are objects to promote your biz" which screams feminists, or we are just used to feminists screaming (one way or the other). And feminist does normally get lumped in with raging and angry which some are not (some are interested in equality).
I am not sure if the media made feminists look this way or if the feminists looked this way first. Either way they both generally look the same now.
As for the ads being stupid, everyone is different and are interested by different things. I think plenty of stuff is stupid but it still seems to have a following. Agree with the accountants version though
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