Yahoo apologizes for lap dancers at Taiwan Hack Day

October 19, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

hack-girls-2Yahoo apologized for bringing scantily clad dancers onstage at its most recent Hack Day in Taiwan over the weekend.

Chris Yeh, who is head of Yahoo’s Developer Network, wrote:

As many folks have rightly pointed out, the “Hack Girls” aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose. And it’s certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.

Hack Days, where developers race to create web applications in less than 24 hours using Yahoo’s APIs or other open-source libraries, started internally within Yahoo back in 2005. The first public Hack Day was actually won by a team of all women in 2006 for a project that automatically blogged photos taken with a camera.

The decision to bring dancers was roundly criticized by observers including Flickr! co-founder Caterina Fake. “For shame. I’m frankly disgusted,” she tweeted. (Flickr was bought by Yahoo in 2005, the same year the Hack Days started.)

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • One small slip of the mind and you've made a huge Boo Boo. Great that an apology was made though
    Http://www.onesherpa.com
  • Prefect
    It was out of line, regardless of geography. Here is what the author is referring to: http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/10/y...
  • I can't tell if you're serious or your tongue is very firmly in your cheek.
  • Where was the outrage last year?
  • Well that's Taiwan style.

    Families enjoy it at the temple, why can't geeks?

    Scantily dressed girls at temple gathering, you've been warned: http://www.therealtaiwan.com/taiwanese-soft-cor...
  • nwjerseyliz
    Yes, didn't Taiwan Hack Day have these dancers as "entertainment" last year, too? Tacky and making an unfriendly environment for women & gay men (plus some straight men I know).

    Kind of distracting from the goal of creating hacking projects over the course of an evening, no? Really a bad, bad move.
  • realmenlikenakedwomen
    Isn't it about time the tech community grew a set of testicles? Give me a break.
  • Majk
    They should have had scantily clad men too to make it equal, then everyone would be happy :-)))))))))
  • Why do it if you have to be sorry about it later and why be sorry if you have done it with so much planning and spending so much money???