For the non-technical: Yahoo! Hack Day is an event where web and software developers spend nights at the Yahoo! campuses around the world to develop anything they want using Yahoo! technologies. They try to make it fun (the US version brought in Beck one year, GirlTalk the next) and have awards the next day although it’s mostly for the camaraderie.
So when the event was held this year in Taipei, what did Yahoo! Taiwan do? They hired lapdancers. Needless to say, a lot of people formerly affiliated with Yahoo!’s developer programs — already smarting from the lack of females in technology — were pretty pissed. (Full disclosure: I also previously worked at Yahoo!.) But a quick straw poll from the Taiwanese members of 8Asians kinda shrugged it off: one commenter on Gawker even noted that “being Taiwanese, all I can say is this is considered harmless fun in Taiwan and is culturally OK.” Also, people completely up in arms about this: your outrage should have started last year.
Is this an example of Yahoo! Taiwan completely going over the line? Or is this truly just a cultural thing?
