This time, it got a big response – but not the one IBM was hoping for.
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Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree with people slamming IBM for its crassness, tactlessness and patronising approach on the subject. “We know you love beauty products, so we used a product you can understand”. It missed the mark for some and we apologize. “It is being discontinued”.
However, IBM’s initiative drew criticism from notable technologist Asher Wolf, the founder of Cryptoparty, amongst others.
Of course, in the world of the social network campaign there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Gizmodo writer Mika McKinnon pointed out that the timing of the initiative was bad – 30 years on from a mass shooting at a Montreal engineering school that left 14 women dead. But a hairdryer-based hackathon is not the way to entice women into science. “‘They mean well’ doesn’t excuse ignorance for a multibillion-dollar worldwide corporation”.
While #HackAHairDryer gave the impression of a well intentioned campaign, whomever designed it clearly didn’t understand its’ goal. The campaign has since been pulled.
He said: “The videos were part of a larger campaign to promote STEM careers”.
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Although the campaign video, with this slogan: ‘Girls don’t like science?’, Women can’t code? It backfired as well. They’re great tools, and a lot of women own them. One tweeter, named RebeccaDV, wrote: “IBM, no one is asking male scientists to hack beard trimmers”. What they don’t need is for patronizing, lip service-y hashtags like #HackAHairDryer to excuse IBM from creating actual solutions to those systemic problems. Women occupy more than half of the total labor force – but they only account for one-quarter of core STEM jobs, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation report.
