Women in advertising, are we still the wife Ogilvy spoke of?

It's been a whirlwind week already for a lot of women, especially if they happen to be a tad geeky. First, Urban Scientist DNLee was called an "urban whore" when she had the gall to turn down unpaid writing work. Scientific American deleted her blog posts about it, because of 'legal issues', while twitter erupted in the hashtag #standingwithDNLee.
Later Snipeyhead who has previously responded to sexist gamer posters with gender shenanigans, and Shanley who once managed to have Geeklist destroy their brand image in a few short tweets ended up in some sort of twitter flame war over women in tech. Shanley has penned "fuck you I got mine", while an 'angry young mathematician' named Meredith Patterson wrote "Okay, Feminism, It’s Time We Had a Talk About Empathy" in response. To add gasoline to the fire, a designer named Justine bravely shared the story of her assault which happened at a tech-conference with the world, and over at Hacker news the ensuing discussion was deleted because "flamewar". Since then I've practically watched two trenches being dug among my twitter friends, and hand grenades of profanity-filled tweets thrown between them for days. Serious issues of sexual assault, gender discrimination, color discrimination, and even compensation in the world of free culture is being hotly debated here spearheaded by modern Joan of Arcs' armed with smart phones & blogs.

Meanwhile, in the famously sexist industry called advertising.... The 3% conference is getting press! Their biggest writeup appearing even in the Chicago Tribune. The 3% conference is created by women, for women, about women, with women speakers, on the topic of women in advertising and as a target market, is finally getting some big name publications attention. Yeay!

Now, I realize it's the Forbes style file, and not Forbes itself, but the headline "What To Wear: Mad Men Modern Advertising Women Attend The 3% Conference" made me do a double take. The woman who founded the conference, Kat Gordon, is being interviewed by another woman about what to wear. Yes, really.

I don't even know what to say.


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Dabitch's picture

There's a potential story on reputation management here, as I just spotted the choice of learning Python instead of Ruby based on the recent happenings in the Ruby community. Oh how quickly Donglegate at PyCon seems to have been forgotten... or? PyCon leaders apologized, though. The creator of Ruby on Rails is not apologizing for something he didn't do that happened at a conference he wasn't involved in.

@shanley You're completely out of line.— DHH (@dhh) October 15, 2013

.@dhh Your face is completely out of line.— Shanley (@shanley) October 15, 2013

kidsleepy's picture

Blind rage, class warfare and schoolyard name calling. *Checks history books.* Don't think Joan of Arc ever did any of that.

Dabitch's picture

I'll just leave this here.

@cindygallop sez there's not enough overlap between tech and advertising. Off to the races at #3PercentConf pic.twitter.com/g1sL9vdcRX— JMillerBoston (@JMillerBoston) October 16, 2013

kidsleepy's picture

Off to the races indeed.