This week in our WiC roundup: Ivanka's CES keynote goes off 'without a hitch'; sharing salary info is the new talking about sex; advertisers keep tripping over their own shoelaces; and more.

Eryn Leavens, Special Features & Copy Editor

January 17, 2020

4 Min Read
WiCipedia: CES Recap, Salary Reveals & Outdated Advertising

This week in our WiCipedia roundup: Ivanka's CES keynote goes off "without a hitch"; sharing salary info is the new talking about sex; advertisers keep tripping over their own shoelaces; and more.

  • Advertisers never seem to learn from their mistakes. BBC explained that an advertisement in the London Underground from People Per Hour, a freelancing platform, has done it again. The ad, which shows an image of a laughing woman, states, "You do the girl boss thing. We'll do the SEO thing." Unsurprisingly, the company received a bevy of complaints for the tone-deaf ad, which seemed to imply that women couldn't handle technical tasks like SEO. The company has since apologized and removed the word "girl" from the ad, as the term "girl boss" is decidedly on the decline. (See WiCipedia: Girl Bosses, Returnships & 'Women Don't Require Fixing'.) Figure 1: The Term "Girl Boss" Is a Bit Passe... (Source: Pixabay) (Source: Pixabay)

    • Last week's CES coverage raised quite the ruckus about Ivanka Trump's keynoter position, yet reactions about her actual presentation were mixed. CTA President Gary Shapiro interviewed Trump on stage and discussed her tech and skills training-focused work at the White House for roughly 40 minutes to a packed house. There was no mention during the talk of the pre-attendance protests, though the hashtag #BoycottCES made its mark on Twitter. Marketwatch reported that the event went off "without a hitch, despite controversy," while Fortune quoted an actual woman in tech who called it a "lazy attempt to emulate diversity." (See WiCipedia: Ivanka Trump's CES Keynote & Male Bosses Promote Men More.)

    • CES has a messy relationship with women in general, and that awkwardness seems to extend to sex tech. While the show has made headlines in recent years for blocking sex tech companies founded by and intended for women, it's also blatantly advocated for companies in the same category intended for men, not to mention the (female-only) booth babes. Mashable covered this year's sex-tech conference segment, and found that it "dominated" the show floor, though the verdict is still out on if the risque sector will be a conference mainstay. A company that CES blocked last year, Lora DiCarlo's Osé, made an appearance this year, along with ten other exhibitors who were allowed in the rebranded "health and wellness category" on a trial basis. The guidelines for admission were strict and nonsensical though, leaving many exhibitors out in the cold, to their chagrin. As Mashable put it, "Sex tech didn't just bring fun and novelty to the show floor. The sector and its plethora of brilliant, boundary-pushing leaders also brought with them a more human perspective on the role tech can play in our lives -- something the rest of CES sorely lacks."(See WiCipedia: Risk Taking, Imposter Syndrome & CES Double Standards.)

    • Sharing salary info may be the new hot topic for women, if The New York Times is correct in its predictions. While taboo topics of yore may have been more scandalous, in our current day and age of unequal pay and double standards, everyone wants to know what everyone else is making, no matter where they work. Some are even posting their salaries (and others') on public platforms, like the founders of Ladies Get Paid, a career development website, or discussing it over Friendsgiving, not to mention social media salary reveals. Does this mean money conversations are no longer only in hushed tones? "Slowly but surely, it seems, that taboo is being broken down by a new generation of workers. Forget talking about our sex lives. The modern woman is talking about money." (See WiCipedia: Glass Ceiling Justice, Tech on TV & the Dark Ages of Advertising.)

    • It's difficult to enact change on the ground floor when it isn't originating from the very top, and a truer statement couldn't apply to the equal rights amendment that the US Justice Dept. is currently fighting in court. Huff Post picked apart the complicated issue in an article that tackles just how backward and outdated our government truly is. While we highly encourage you to read the full article, essentially, women's rights are at stake if Republicans continue to block an amendment to the Constitution, a block which would make it so that not everyone has equal rights in the eyes of the law. The amendment consists of one sentence, which has been proposed for addition to the Constitution since 1972: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Truly, if we can't all agree on that simple statement, how can we possibly hope for women to have equal opportunities as men at work, or that girls will be able to enter any occupational field that they want? (See AlcaLu's Gorti: Diversity Shouldn't Be an Initiative.)

      — Eryn Leavens, Special Features & Copy Editor, Light Reading

About the Author(s)

Eryn Leavens

Special Features & Copy Editor

Eryn Leavens, who joined Light Reading in January 2015, attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before earning her BA in creative writing and studio arts from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. She also completed UC Berkeley Extension's Professional Sequence in Editing.

She stumbled into tech copy editing after red-penning her way through several Bay Area book publishers, including Chronicle Books, Counterpoint Press/Soft Skull Press and Seal Press. She spends her free time lifting heavy things, growing her own food, animal wrangling and throwing bowls on the pottery wheel. She lives in Alameda, Calif., with two cats and two greyhounds.

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