all too real

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Herman Cain doesn't believe he is the cause of gender workplace issues either.

ignoring gender diversity issues makes us a lot like this guy

Many of us male techies feel we can honestly deny gender is an issue in our professional world in but then stuff like this f*ckery reported by Valleywag happens:

TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 startup conference: an app called Titstare, presented by two grinning Australian dudes, exactly as tasteless as it sounds.

The stunt—which the Sydney duo claims was just a “joke”—was done before to an audience who paid for the opportunity to watch what was essentially a shitty routine pulled from the boys’ cabin at sleepaway camp. Some in attendance actually laughed and cheered, so I suppose part of the crowd thought they got their money’s worth.

There’s more.

If you’d like to feel worse today, here’s another “demo” from the same “hackathon” “presentation,” which is basically a guy pretending to jerk off before a crowd that included a 9-year-old girl.

TechCrunch is owned by AOL. AOL owns a lot of brands including HuffPo, Moviefone and MapQuest. This conference series is not a small deal. It’s international. Somehow, in San Francisco, California in 2013 organizers for this huge conference series hosted by a premier brand of an international tech company believes that these bits were amusing and appropriate. They even publicized the bits before someone complained:

TechCrunch proceeded to tweet a link to Titstare from its official Disrupt account, but decided that was perhaps unwise, and deleted it, settling for this instead.

This is a symptom of the problem of not having gender diversity in tech.