IBM pulls #HackAHairDryer campaign

The video is part of a larger IBM campaign to encourage women to pursue careers in science, technology and engineering.

Woman-kind has voiced its collective opinion across things like Twitter – which is coincidentally another company in which they are under represented – and upped the expectation stakes by explaining that they have better things to do than hack a hairdryer.

Once the backlash began, the company acknowledged it had “missed the mark” and dropped the campaign immediately.

The tweet was roundly ridiculed by women on social media.

Wouldn’t know where to start on a hairdryer.- Sarah Brown (@auntysarah) December 7, 2015″Let’s get more women into science by playing up exhausted gender stereotypes!” -someone at @IBM #HackAHairDryer- Kirthan Aujlay (@kirthanaujlay) December 7, 2015@IBM no one is asking male scientists to hack beard trimmers. “It is being discontinued”, an IBM spokesperson said. The video has since been deleted. It is called Hack-a-Hair Dryer. The lack of women in the tech industry continues to baffle Lane-Fox.

‘All that’s happened is that one bunch of very rich white men have transferred their money to another bunch of very rich white men and, worse than that, they are in a very small concentrated area of the world, in Silicon Valley…I still find that really baffling.

Women who are already working in tech could probably benefit from an IBM campaign created to address harassment in the workplace, the gender wage gap, and prevailing biases against women in STEM. In October, EDF Energy’s “Pretty Curious” also received major criticism for feeding off the same unfortunate stereotype of women in tech.

High-profile women in tech, such as Helen Hou-Sandi, a lead developer at WordPress and the director of platform experience at 10up, a web publishing company, and Tracy Chou, an engineer at Pinterest, came out in support of the hashtag.

“Girls don’t like science?”