Yahoo Hires Lap Dancers For Hack Day

Oct 20, 2009 Author: Daniel | Filed under: Social Media, Technology

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There seems to be a viral outage at Yahoo! which is a public company that conducts their event (i.e. a Hack Day apparently) with Go-Go girls. The dis-respect for females were apparent. But to add to that is how Yahoo! covered it up as much as they can by shutting down a number of photos or videos posted to their sites. We think this is Lifehacking at its lowest (to generate buzz) even though they had apologized somewhat. This is definitely a brand disaster for the company. Moral of this hack: use common sense.

All,

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. 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.

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.

Best,

Chris Yeh
Head of YDN

twitter: @ydn
email: cyeh at yahoo-inc dot com

Posted at October 19, 2009 5:20 PM