Great fun at the Microsoft Xbox party with a million geeks! 😁 #gamedev #gdc #gdcplay #sanfrancisco
A photo posted by Henning Ludvigsen (@henningludvigsen) on Mar 17, 2016 at 11:29pm PDT
Microsoft hired a bunch of women wearing very little clothing to dance and socialize with people at the company’s official Game Developers Conference after-party last night in San Francisco, Business Insider reports.
It’s crazy that Microsoft would so blatantly sexualize women for a few reasons. For one, don’t tech companies realize that it’s not okay to do that anymore? Over the last couple of years, conferences have gotten better about not using “booth babes” to get people to check out their products. Secondly, Microsoft hosts a women in gaming luncheon every year at GDC. Third of all, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft is “very focused” on diversity and even welcomed Rev. Jesse Jackson’s push for inclusion in tech, he said at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in December. He also noted that Microsoft has deployed unconscious bias training to over 100,000 employees. Someone or several people at Microsoft clearly have not received the memo that it’s not cool to be sexist.
Women, of course, are free to wear whatever the F they want to wear. What’s problematic is that Microsoft chose to throw a party that clearly caters to heterosexual men by hiring women as objects of sex.
“THIS is why we have a shit rate of women in games,” Kamina Vincent, who attended the party, wrote on Twitter. “Because these fucking boys clubs that make people unwelcome. Fuck you.”
She went on to say, “I’m not blaming the women. They’ve got their job for whatever reason. But fuck you Microsoft.”
Microsoft’s latest diversity report cited a workforce that is 73.1 percent male, 59.2 percent white, 5.4 percent Hispanic and 3.5 percent black. TechCrunch has reached out to Microsoft and will update this story if we hear back.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KH6wiSTtNks/