Morning Update: Backlash after IBM asks women to hack a hairdryer; Cindy Gallop has her say on Publicis restructure
Techcrunch: IBM Asks Women In Tech To Hack Hair Dryers, Women Tweet Back To Tell IBM It’s Not The 1950s
Looks like IBM needs to reengineer what it thinks about women. A tweet went out on IBM’s official Twitter feed asking women in tech to, I kid you not, “Join the #HackAHairDryer experiment.”
Not hack computer software, math problems or something of social impact – a beauty product. According to IBM’s Twitter account, that’s “what matters in science” to women.
But at IBM, it IS the 1950’s.
That’s why IBM is being left to eat the dust of every other major IT player.
Their customer engagements are boring, their marketing is boring, their events are sedatives, they’ve no interesting stories to tell, and even when they do, they somehow make them sound boring. Their decision-making processes are something not even Franz Kafka could have dreamt up. This little fracas is just a small symptom of a bigger, sadder whole.