I'm still enjoying my time here at RSA. Today was another good day. More great vendor contacts (more on that in a bit), and great sessions. We also had good weather today; no rain, and the sun came out for a bit. Oh, and then for dinner, I went to a WONDERFUL place called Lefty O'Doul's. Lefty O'Doul was a player for the San Francisco Giants way back in the 50s (apparently shortly after they moved from New York). He also was a great ambassador for baseball, making several trips to Japan to spread baseball abroad. After he retired, he started this bar and "hoff-brau". Basically, it's cafeteria-style, and the food is great. I had carved roast beef with au jus, sliced ham, salad, baked beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a roll. And all for about $10. As my daughter Katie would say, "ordinary, but delicious".
On to one of the more disturbing parts of the RSA Conference (or indeed, any tech conference, and the entire tech industry, for that matter). Every RSA conference has a theme, related to codes and cryptography in some way. This year's theme is "The Codes of Prohibition," and focused on a lady named Elizebeth Smith. Ms. Smith cracked the codes of several rumrunners back in the 1920s, and helped the Department of Justice bring them down. She was an incredibly intelligent lady, with an English degree. After she retired from government work, she and her husband authored a book that declared that there was no code in the works of Shakespeare to prove disputed authorship.
The irony of this began for me on Monday. One thing I noticed as I was checking in that day was a disturbing lack of women. I estimated at the time that the ratio was approximately 1 woman for every 10 men. Now, once the conference began, the number of women increased, but the trend was no less disturbing, for a different reason. It became more disturbing as I wandered the exhibit floor and began talking with vendors. Most of these women were younger (20s) and fairly attractive. But they all had one thing in common.
Let me demonstrate this commonality with a scenario that repeated itself many times for me. I would walk along and see a booth. I would approach the booth. A young, attractive lady would approach me and ask if I had any questions. Now, my assumption early on was that this lady was there to actually answer my questions, so I would go into my spiel about some of my company's security needs and how-could-your-product-help-me? She would then answer in a very cursory fashion, but after about two or three questions, she would either a) look pleadingly at one of the men in the booth, at which point he would step in and answer my additional questions, or b) she would lead me to one of the men in the booth, introduce me to him, and leave. Not one of any of the female vendor representatives I spoke with sufficiently answered any of my questions or even spoke with me for more than two minutes. Basically, they were eye candy, bait for men roaming the exhibit hall.
Now, please don't misinterpret what I'm saying here. There are many women in IT, and in security. I know, because I saw them, and several had the same CISSP ribbon on their Full Attendee badges that I have on mine. Knowing firsthand how difficult it is to obtain a CISSP credential, I know these ladies must be very intelligent and very good at what they do.
But the dark side of this industry, and the reason we have eye candy, is that most of the people in it are male. All the speakers I saw in the conference guide were male (and certainly the speakers at the sessions I attended). When I see attractive ladies walking around the exhibit floor, they're usually on duty trolling for contacts for their companies. For example, this afternoon, I was on my way to talk to a vendor. As I made my way to their booth, I saw a group of 3 ladies walking along with fluorescent green T-shirts that "Follow Me". I also noticed that they had the logo of the particular vendor I wanted to see, so I did indeed follow them. When I got to the vendor's booth, I saw not only the ladies I had followed, but an entire army of these ladies, perhaps 20-25 of them in all, all in green t-shirts, all young, and all attractive. They were apparently sent out to roam the floor and get lonely security geeks to follow them.
If you know anything about marketing, then this strategy makes perfect sense. First, know your target audience. The kind of guys at this show are your typical computer geek types; totally consumed by what they do with security, and very technical (and thus, frankly, somewhat socially inept at times). I know a lot of these guys; I've spent my entire career with them. Granted, not all are like this, but there are plenty who are. Second, appearances are very important. That's why all of these ladies are young and attractive. Third, get the attention of your target audience. In other words, what better way to get a computer geek's attention then to parade an attractive female in a fluorescent green shirt in front of him? They weren't there to answer questions...they lead the geeks to the salesMEN, who then answer the geek's questions. And EVERY vendor had eye candy in their booth. In two cases I distinctly remember, the eye candy had even been hired recently, perhaps even for this conference; they had not sufficiently memorized what their company did to even introduce their company's products and strategies to me, and thus I had to be handed off to the men quite quickly.
This is a common theme in all tech marketing, actually. During the tech downturn a couple of years ago, I remember hearing comments from resellers that they'd had to "lay off some of the eye candy;" the common reason was that they (the eye candy) weren't doing anything useful to build business (read that, they didn't have a billable function that could be quantified any longer) and thus couldn't be kept on staff. Their purpose was the same as many of the women in these booths; attract the men who make the decisions, perhaps even flirt with them, then hand them off to the men who finish the deal. It's ironic and sad, to me, that we still harbor such ridiculous ideas in this industry, where apparently, aside from a very select few like Ms. Smith, women really aren't expected to be much more than eye candy. I half-expected one of the salesmen I spoke with to say, "Honey, why don't you go stand over there now? The men need to talk."
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