Booth Babes, Street Clothes, and GDC: Thanks But You sort of Made It Worse | Footsteps

(Note: this post is getting some traffic and I’m editing as I go in response to questions and feedback. Edits are marked in italics.)

I’m not a lady easily upset by the silly things that happen in male-dominated cultures. When I went on stage to speak at DEFCON 19 a series of events escalated to a portion of the audience shouting for me to take my shirt off. While I was a little sad that conference security had no idea how to de-escalate that (I sure hope they teach them now) and I had to do it myself, it isn’t fair to hold a whole conference, much less a whole culture accountable for the actions of about 2-dozen piss-drunk semi-asshole dudes who thought they were “just being funny.”  I was proud to speak at DEFCON 20 as a member of a community I dearly love, and I plan to apply to speak at DEFCON 21.

Yesterday was my first time at GDC, and for the first time I felt really uncomfortable at a conference. It wasn’t that anybody was being unkind, it was a simple numbers game. We all know there aren’t many lady developers, especially in video games. There are, however, a lot of companies that have hired women who are pretty but not models, dressed in normal street clothes to push whatever product they have. Products range from energy drinks to some developer program to help market your app. This meant that when you first met a girl, it was statistically safe to assume she was not technical and just there to push something. This assumption was remarkably hard to break. When trying to join lots of interesting conversations, I either had to be that asshole who casually drops her credentials, or deal with a few rounds of being told things were “complicated engineering stuff.”

Eventually, I found it socially easier to introduce myself as a tag-along to my boyfriend than to try to break my own path, and wound up spending most of the day either stuck to his side as my “see? I’m not here to be evil” mascot or walking around with other dudes. It was incredibly depressing. I met some really wonderful people in the game community who accepted me for who I am and who I am sure I’ll be friends with for a long time, but the overall atmosphere was very grim, and I was a little relieved to go home.

The only reason I find this to be worth bringing up is because even my extraordinarily egalitarian boyfriend didn’t quite see my plight until I explained it. He commented a few times on how few “booth babes” there were, only counting the ones who posed in bikinis with men holding plastic swords in photographs, and thought it was a great sign of progress. Me? I found them way easier to deal with than their plain-clothes counterparts. I’m not a model, nor was I dressed in stilettos and a bikini, so nobody would ever mistake me for being one of them. It was their plain-clothes fairly-ordinary-looking counterparts that made my life hard. Goodness knows, if I had the power to bring tons of other technical women at the conference that would be an optimal solution but barring that, selfish as it may sound, if I could have substituted all the plain-clothes promoters for traditional booth babes, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Then I’d be free to have a great time being what I normally am at conferences: a curiosity, an anomaly, and an excitable nerd.