John Callegari, The Daily Record Newswire
Two weeks ago, a pair of Australian developers took the stage at Disrupt San Francisco, TechCrunch’s annual hackathon, to unveil their latest app.
This is not unusual at events like Disrupt. The misogynistic undertones of the app were also sadly familiar.
In short, the purpose of the app, according to developer David Boulton, was to allow users to share pictures of themselves staring at women’s breasts. Complete with a suggestive, larger-than-life slide-show, Boulton and his partners explained that staring at this part of a woman’s anatomy delivers actual health benefits – and while many in the Disrupt audience were amused, not everyone was laughing.
Among those failing to see the humor was the mother of another Disrupt presenter — a 9-year-old girl — who immediately took to Twitter to express her disgust. She likely didn’t appreciate the male masturbation-simulation app, “Circle Shake,” that was presented at the event just minutes earlier, complete with superfluous, piped-in moaning.
Disrupt San Francisco is not the only tech venue where sexism rears its ugly head. Earlier this year, a woman publicly shamed two developers on Twitter for openly cracking jokes about “forking” and “big dongles” at another California tech conference. The tweet resulted in the firing of one of the offenders – leading to threats and even cyberattacks for the woman and her company, until she herself was ultimately terminated.
Such incidents shine a light on an unfortunate truth most tech insiders know all too well: Despite honest efforts to end such shenanigans, the tech world is still mostly a boys-only club.
“Sexism is a major problem in the tech industry,” TechCrunch editors admitted in an official apology issued by the news website after the breast-ogling and Circle Shake presentations.
Dina Losito, who co-founded Long Beach-based startup app Shopthismagazine with Teresa Rivera, said she’s sometimes felt like a fish out of water at larger tech-industry events.
“When we’ve gone to conferences and trade shows, we’ve been the glaring standout,” Losito said.
That’s unsurprising, considering a 2012 Women Who Tech survey revealing that only 11 percent of all Fortune 500 companies have female executives – and only 5 percent of tech startups are owned by women.
Those numbers haven’t stopped Losito and Rivera, who met while working at Apple. Their startup, which was recently accepted into the Long Island Tech COMETS program for budding technology companies, is a digital newsstand that lets users click on a particular outfit or piece of clothing in a magazine and instantly purchase it.
While they’re technically savvy, Losito and Rivera aren’t coders, which means they needed some tech help to make their app a reality. Rather than shelve the product, they brought in male co-founder Branislav Gjorcevski to handle that and other backend necessities.
“Teresa and I don’t write code, but that’s not going to stop us from starting a technology company,” Losito said. “All we need is an IT guy.”
Jeanine Bondi, managing partner of Melville-based staffing solutions company Ringo, said while technology is still a male-dominated field, she hasn’t seen first-hand the kind of rampant sexism that darkened those California conferences.
“The people I interact with, they don’t care about gender,” Bondi said. “They care about your technical skills and your ability.”
Such abilities led to Bondi, in addition to her role at Ringo, to become a vice president and senior marketing director at Melville-based IT staffing company Lloyd IT.
“The opportunity is certainly there for an equal playing field,” Bondi said.
But the challenge of the boys-only club is still there, and breaking it up may mean introducing more diversity. Those Australian developers, for example, probably wouldn’t have disgraced the stage with their extended joke presentation if the audience contained a higher female-to-male ratio.
Losito agreed that barriers are broken down even further by one-on-one interactions.
“On a granular level, everyone has been welcoming to us,” she said. “I can’t say it’s specific to what we’ve encountered, but [sexism in the industry] still exists.”
That’s not to say women haven’t been making inroads in the tech world. IBM, Yahoo and Hewlett Packard all have welcomed female CEOs in the last few years, and on Long Island, tech-oriented women believe this is just the beginning.
“It’s bound to become more equal, just because there are more women out there than men,” Losito said. “And as more women become heads of technology companies, it will just continue to dispel some of the mystique that it’s intimidating (for women) — and help other women take on these lead roles.”
