Booth babes, corsets, porn... tech show has long way to go

Holding the technology conference in ‘Sin City’ does little to help erase its long-held sexist mindset

IT IS the biggest technology conference in the world being held in an era when organisers have pledged to stamp out the sexism of the past.

Yet at the opening party of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in an annex of Caesar’s Palace casino on the Las Vegas strip, partygoers enter a room where a group of women, wearing corsets and underwear, are dancing while holding aloft letters spelling out the name of a big-spending attendee.

The show was supposed to have cleaned up its act but as The Sunday

Telegraph’s female reporters experienced, the event has a long way to go.

One man travelling to the event by plane asked a female Telegraph reporter sitting next to him if she was planning to “straddle” him to get to the lavatory. At the event itself, a Telegraph journalist was touched without her consent by a male attendee.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which organises the CES, says its rules, in place for many years, say exhibits cannot be focused on pornography, and “booth babes” aren’t allowed.

“As you can imagine for an event of this scale, we can’t police everything that’s going on in the city,” says Jean Foster, vice-president of marketing.

“We really make the priority of focusing on fully sanctioned CES events.”

And, at those events, “we do ask people to wear proper dress and so on, but we also have the right to close down anything we deem inappropriate.”

But some of the old issues are still here. For example, it’s hard to see how Naughty America passed muster, given the CTA’s no-porn rule.

There are no scantily clad women at the stall, but put on the company’s virtual reality goggles and it gets adult pretty quickly. “In this one, you’re a man and you’re doing stuff to women,” Ian Paul, the company’s chief information officer, explains. “You really get a sense of it, right? You can always just take the glasses off if it gets a bit much.”

And while the CTA claims models in revealing or tight-fitting outfits who are hired to promote products, aka the “booth babes”, haven’t been allowed for years, a quick tour of one of the conference halls suggests that some companies are still hiring attractive young women rebranded as “fitness models”, to dance, demo their products and pose with attendees.

Earlier this week, the CTA banned the Ose robotic sexual massager, a product for women, from being exhibited, calling it “immoral and obscene”, and last year tried to prevent Lioness, a smart vibrator, from appearing.

Liz Klinger, the co-founder and chief executive of Lioness, says there is a “double standard” that censors female sexuality. The issue with CES, she adds, is “an overall environment of sexism... a thousand subtle little things”.

The event, like much of the tech industry, has long been plagued by gender inequality and practices. CES also failed for many years to give women a large enough platform to speak. This year, under pressure from equality groups, it has improved its ratio.

Organisers of fringe events said they were given a target of 30 per cent female speakers, with one announcing that its conference track had ended up with 46 per cent women on stage. Overall the list of keynote speakers was almost half female, earning it approval from the GenderAvenger group.

On the surface, things have changed since Gary Shapiro, the CTA chief, appeared to back the use of “booth babes” in 2012. But the Las Vegas environment doesn’t help matters. It is a sexually charged city. As the conference tries to clean up its act, perhaps the question is whether it is still an appropriate venue.

‘As you can imagine for an event of this scale, we can’t police everything that’s going on in the city’