Friday, June 20. 2008

phpwomen at DPC08

So, one thing I forgot to mention in my DPC08 wrapup was my involvement with the phpwomen booth. Lig emailed me some months in advance asking if I'd be an official "booth babe" while at the conference -- basically wearing a T-shirt to show my support of the movement, and answering any questions that others might have regarding it. While I haven't been particularly active with phpwomen, I of course agreed.

As Lorna Jane noted, there were very few women at the conference. I'd say estimating them at 2% of total attendees would very much be a stretch. Also very strange was how little interest the phpwomen booth attracted -- during those times I was at the booth, we'd get a few people coming forward, but not many... and very few males. This is very much in contrast to my observations at ZendCon last year, when there were almost constantly folks at the booth, and dozens of males were wearing the phpwomen t-shirts throughout the conference.

That said, one very funny picture came out of my participation, snapped by Stefan:

Feeling lucky with the booth babe

I think it speaks for itself, no? :-)

Posted by Matthew Weier O'Phinney in PHP at 13:30 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)
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Hi Matthew,

It was great meeting you and thank you again for being our booth babe !
On a side-note: the 2% is correct. We counted 8 php women on a total of some 350 -400 attendees.

Grz, Juliette
#1 Juliette (Link) on 2008-06-20 18:24 (Reply)
On my wrapup blog post I analysed it a bit. I think it's a cultural difference, judging from the comments I got on my booth babe shirt. "dude, you are wearing a shirt for women". "have you seen your back? it says babe there, I think the mocked you with that shirt".
#2 Ivo (Link) on 2008-06-21 04:14 (Reply)
Thanks for being our booth babe - and being such good company at the conference. It didn't occur to me that a joke like this would not be understood in .nl, normally the Dutch sense of humour is pretty good :-)
#3 LornaJane (Link) on 2008-06-21 04:34 (Reply)

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