Yet when the BBC ran a story on the practice of hiring scantily-clad models to stand around booths and draw stares from wandering men, it found an interesting defender: Consumer Electronics Association president and CEO Gary Shapiro, the guy who puts on the biggest electronics trade show in the USA.
"Well, sometimes it is a little old school, but it does work," Shapiro tells the BBC. "People naturally want to go towards what they consider pretty. So your effort to try to get a story based on booth babes, which is decreasing rather rapidly in the industry, and say that it's somehow sexism imbalancing, it's cute but it's frankly irrelevant in my view." Cute? Irrelevant? "Imbalancing?" (Is that even a word?) I'm sorry. Would you care to try again, Gary?
The reason his answer is so bothersome is because as the head of the CEA he is, in a very real sense, speaking for all of us in the technology industry. And that Mad Men bullshit doesn't represent who we are as an industry anymore, and it certainly doesn't represent what we should aspire to become. Technology is about the future, and this attitude is from the past.
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