oh dear.
The main goal behind these calendars are
- prove that women geeks, apart from being successful nerds are equally sexy as Britneys of the world,i.e. promote geekiness among the fairer sex, and
- start a college scholarship fund for women majoring in computers.
Like I said, well-intentioned but sexist and annoying. And now it turns out they shipped the calendars with a bug:
..the 15-month calendar had errors in October 2006, with the month starting on Saturday not Sunday, and May 2007 - which starts on a Tuesday not Monday as it should.
“We’ve got red rose embarrassed faces.”
Whoops! They’re replacing the defective calendars with shiny new ones, and they’re also putting out posters showing geeky women in one of four poses: “Four of the calendar images were matched with a slogan to promote the calendar objectives of encouraging women into IT careers including the slinky Catwoman image, the famous Ursula Andress, Dr No image, the front cover American Beauty picture and the Legend of Zorro image.” With role models like those, how can any woman fail to rush into a career in IT?
November 12th, 2006 at 7:22 pm
“With role models like those, how can any woman fail to rush into a career in IT?”
– Well I guess the calendar just proves that women are as geeky as men!! - i.e. they too ship lotsa bugs with their piece of code, which means they are really a HARD CORE GEEK!
On a serious note, I found it very discouraging for the fact that the organizers of the calendar focussed more on PR aspect rather than the on the main theme for the product, i.e. a perfectly delivered calendar which breaks the taboo of geek females being not sexy/charming!!..
~Ashish.
November 17th, 2006 at 12:25 am
yeah wrong dates ended up costing us $10,000 in wasted pritned stock (but we’re going to give them away next year post calendar season to people running IT events.
Speaking of geeks WHERE ARE THEY - we have 3 great competitions in the calendar with fab prizes eg: TV, DVD, iPod, iPod accessories, broadband cards, laptop tekskins, wireless equipment, professional travel bags, wine, movie tickets etc. just waiting for people to enter and win: The 3 competitions are– “LaMarr Code” to locate and decode a message that is hidden in the calendar; “Inspect for Gadgets: - every main image has technology placed, some obvious, some hidden; and “Desperately seeking Sonja” – hidden in one image is a smaller image of Sonja Bernhardt the calendar innovator.
Please send all geeks you know to enter SOMEONE has to win and be the first to break the code and solve the hidden message! http://www.itgoddess.info/competitions.htm
November 17th, 2006 at 12:32 am
hey ps re: focusing more on PR - actually that happened to us was an inaccurate story was printed that the press jumped on and went wild it was 6 weeks before we were going to go to the press with our entire “it’s about diversity, of ages, roles, body shapes, ethnicity but the one common thing is the women in IT LOVE their work” - have a look at what they have to say themselves. BUT the press went bezerk over the cover shot and the ursula andress one - leaving little room to be able to ‘correct’ the perceptions. And by the way when I TRIED to correct the media messages no one wnated to print it so we lost opportunities. SO didn’t happen the way we planned and left us scrambling to even finish teh web site and ebanking facilities. SO best laid plans WERE another focus but media PR machine went beserk AND missed the real messages. Me - I’m still tyring to recover from the media and actually feel a bit battered by it and disappointed that the WRONG messages got out.