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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

I wish we had more men who dressed up as booth babes. Don't we have enough body builders in the game industry yet?

That is the secret plot behind "brogramming."

I just hired a split of both genders for the booth of a client at an event next week. Not sure if it's a coincidence that no-one else around me thinks of doing that and that I'm gay, or not..

How could you not know if that's a coincidence? You're the one who did the hiring. Attractiveness either was a factor in your selection of booth people or was not.

I made the decision to get a mix, I didn't personally pick out faces. I also won't be spending any time on the booth other than taking a look at it. So attractiveness wasn't relevant. But that doesn't mean my sexuality wasn't relevant to the decision to include men.

Even if you hire a 50/50 split, it doesn't solve the problem because the ratio in conference attendees is far from even. The conditional probabilities still lead to the conclusion the article complains about.

Actually this event is a consumer tech exhibition where ~43% of the visitors will be female - however the vast majority of hired, good-looking booth staff will still be female.

(And my comment wasn't so much addressing the article as the GP comment which said "I wish we had more men who dressed up as booth babes.")

What would be the benefit of this to the companies promoting their product?

People are generally attracted by attractive people.

I would rather have a talkative, witty, intelligent person at a vendor booth as opposed to an attractive, non-talkative, non-witty, non-intelligent man, but perhaps that's just me.

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