And you are here why?

"Booth Babes" are easily one of the most embarrassing things about going to conferences ( just do an image search on "booth babe" - you'll see wh y). Now  Spencer Chen of Frontback has a nice article about this over at TechCrunch involving an A/B split test he did at an SAP show He had two booths, one w/ "booth-babes", and one with - literally - grandmothers.   Professional, knowledgable, and enthusiastic grandmothers, mind you - but most definitely not "booth-babes". In his words The results? They were great. The booth that was staffed with the booth babes generated a third of the foot traffic (as measured by conversations or demos with our reps) and less than half the leads (as measured by a badge swipe or a completed contact form) while the other team had a consistently packed booth that ultimately generated over 550 leads, over triple from the previous year. He has a whole bunch of reasons for this, but the ones that I agr...

Moritz Stefaner started tracking male vs. female speakers at conferences that he went to, and that evolved into this handy-dandy chart on gender balance in conferences on data visualization (handy!), creative code, and information graphics . The bottom line - its better than I expected, but seriously, that is not saying much (the Erlang / Functional Programming / NoSQL world is heavily skewed towards male speakers...). Here hoping for a far more equitable future... (click to embiggen. Better yet, go to the original for the fully interactive version)