A terrible choice on so many levels
Oddly enough women don’t see Ivanka Trump as a diversity hire.
CES, the eading consumer-electronics trade show, is facing criticism after picking Ivanka Trump to serve as its keynote speaker next month in Las Vegas, after years of being accused of overlooking the role of women in technology.
I find that pretty disgusting and I’m not even a woman in technology.
She has no knowledge or experience or credentials in the field, and she also has no knowledge or experience or credentials in any other field. All she’s ever done is parlay her corrupt father’s celebrity and money into money and celebrity for herself.
“This is a terrible choice on so many levels but also – what an insult to the YEARS AND YEARS of protesting how few women were invited to keynote & being told it was a pipeline problem while similarly-situated men were elevated,” tech commentator Rachel Sklar tweeted. “There are so many great, qualified women. Shame.”
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While the president’s daughter has been involved in White House efforts to boost the economic empowerment of women and their families, and spoke at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in The Hague this year, her engagement with technology is limited.
Plus “has been involved in White House efforts to boost the” blah blah blah doesn’t even mean anything. It’s just noise. Maybe she’s done some actual work, but frankly it seems highly unlikely, and we have no way of knowing what actual work she has done and how good it was. She’s just there, nepotizing, because nobody has managed to stop her yet.
Shapiro said in a statement: “We welcome her to the CES keynote stage, as she shares her vision for technology’s role in creating and enabling the workforce of the future.”
Blah blah blah. Again, it’s just handwaving. It’s meaningless. She has no “vision,” she has nothing to say. Barbie gives a keynote.
Yeah, this is enraging. There are so many qualified women who would have said interesting things. Preferably interesting things about women in technology.
I can’t imagine that Trump’s talk will be well attended.
Keynote speeches are often garbage, in my experience. For some reason, conference organizers like to book people with some sort of name recognition outside of the field and they’re nearly always terrible because the speaker knows fuck all about the subject.
Bill Gates once spoke at a genetics conference I was attending and it was awful. Bill Gates isn’t a natural orator anyway, but add discussing a topic he knows bugger all about and the result is, well, not very inspiring. It would have been better if he’d stuck to the genuinely fantastic work BMGF does and only tangentially referred to genetics.
I even walked out of a keynote once, and I was not the only one to do so, there was a veritable flood of us. Let’s just say that if you are speaking to a conference for autism researchers and clinicians, where autistic people are themselves encouraged to attend and be part of the conversation, you might want to a) know more about autism than what you read on Wikipedia and b) not mention “He Who Shall Not Be Named” or vaccines or any of the woo-woo garbage.
So yeah, crappy keynotes are a thing, at least in biomedical research. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ivanka was invited to a conference I was attending, TBH. I would go, with as many people as I could hustle, just to very loudly and openly walk back out again. I guess that makes me a bad person. :-)
Heh. I gave a keynote once, without even really exactly knowing what a keynote is.