Yahoo! Apologizes for Hiring Lap Dancers for Coding Event

by Truemorist | October 21, 2009 at 10:07 am

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Yahoo! has posted an apology for hiring lap dancers for its Hack Day Taiwan event. The best part of the story? This is the second time that Yahoo! has done this. Maybe they deserve another exclamation mark. Aside from annoyance at not getting an invite, I daresay that this is extremely uncool: it both discourages women from getting involved in the noble pursuit of hacking, and furthers the stereotypes of women as perceived by guys who... don't get out much.

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

It's not really "an incident"... it's something you did! I'm taking notes on that apology- it's a great way to get some hand-wringing action in without actually claiming total responsibility. This will be useful for the next time I either miss a deadline or "somehow" hire lap dancers for a bris.

Regrettable? I can think of some choice words to describe this, and regrettable is so far down the list that you'd need to scroll for a week to reach it.

While I joke about it, I'd be genuinely annoyed if I flew all the way to Taipei for a conference and found myself in the middle of a frat party. It was played out when I was in school, and it's beyond played-out now.