When the ‘Monster noted in disparaging terms the European Commission’s cringeworthy campaign to get more women into IT jobs , we had no idea quite the lengths of misjudgement Brussels would go to.
The project, launched in March 2008, sought – in the kind of jaunty, cutesy terms the commission assumed would appeal to women – to attract “IT Girls.”
The early rumblings from De Beauvoir’s grave were already audible, even over the eager chunterings of anticipation from the IT fraternity.
But now there’s a poster…
A computer-generated Barbie-esque doll has been chosen as the avatar to which women seeking a job in IT should aspire. And look, she’s hip too, because she’s wearing a t-shirt, and a baseball cap at a terribly fashionable angle.
The ‘textspeak’ (because that’s how young women all communicate ye know) for the slogan also misfires, with the tech-savvyless commission officials who designed it spelling ‘great’ as ‘gre@t.’
:-O WTF!!! LOL [etc]
Had any of them bothered to ask their teenage daughters they’d have known its correct contemporary abbreviation in the digital world is ‘gr8’.
And just one more thing: nice job on adopting the term ‘Cyberella’ to depict these pert and presumably plastic ‘IT Girls’ they’re trying to attract.
Had they been IT-literate enough themselves they might have entered the name into Google and changed their minds rather promptly.
After all, what self-respecting tech sector high-flying career woman would care to be associated with ‘Mara, a lithe young Virtual Reality progammer’ who is ‘transformed into a stunningly gorgeous cyber-seductress’ in tawdry 1990’s soft porn flick “Cyberella: Forbidden Passions.”
No, really. Maybe they were simply inspired by the film’s strapline: ‘The wildest fantasies become reality’…
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