FC: A woman's take on the RSA conference

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[I received a number of notes in response to Ralph's RSA-reports on the 
red-vinyl-clad women and Wired's article (which I did not write) on the 
miniskirted-cheerleaders at the conference 
(http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,33756,00.html). So I asked 
somone to write a politech article from a female perspective: Here it is, 
anonymized. --Declan]

*******

Declan-

What geek-loving, tech toy-craving woman wouldn't have enjoyed the RSA 
Conference? While few and far between, the women who did attend RSA '00 
were successful, confident, and often beautiful, and they obviously enjoyed 
the favorable male/female ratio. I was pleasantly surprised that RSA found 
good, thoughtful female panelists for the conference (and seemingly didn't 
try to recruit female speakers just for PC's sake), and the male/female 
speaker ratio was probably slightly closer to parity than the male/female 
attendee ratio. I was also thrilled to see more women on the tech-side 
rather than just on the policy/business-side of crypto, and I thought that 
Dr. Tal Rabin effortlessly held her own on the Cryptographer s panel.

BTW--whoever thought of getting cheerleaders to hawk crypto? One male 
colleague was right-- midriff-baring cheerleaders either scared the geeks 
away or viscerally drew them in for a photo op and _then_ scared them away. 
Does anyone actually remember what they were hawking, anyway? (The wise and 
sanely beautiful women at Thawte would probably agree.) Speaking of which, 
were cheerleaders really that much of a newsworthy item? hmmmmm....men.

And not a pip about the heady burly iron-clad crypto-warrior alpha geeks.

*sigh*.

Maybe women will come into their own at the RSA conf. when we can get the 
Chippendale dancers on stage with Ralph's red vinyl-clad blonde go-go 
girls. Take note, Mr. Bidzos! We want equal ogling rights next year!

So-back to Zero Knowledge. Ian Goldberg did a commendable job explaining 
the technology behind Zero Knowledge on Wednesday, and the Zero Knowledge 
team is giddily raking in a very elite crew to man/woman their ranks. I 
wish them all the best!

-Blonde California Geek


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