CES 2007: No Girls Allowed
I find it frustrating that it took Kim, Sarah and I four hours to register for CES as press, even though we had almost all our information. I had my license, business cards, and articles which I had written in the last 6 months. (All three of which are necessary to register as press.) However, when the three of us went to get our press badges, we were at first denied entry into the show. This was the series of unfortunate events which occurred throughout our registration.
First, we were told that we didn’t have business cards. We each handed her our business cards. We were told that we weren’t sixteen. I handed her my driver’s license. She glanced at my license and then handed it back. Next, she told us we didn’t have articles which we had written. We handed her our articles. She then told us that there was no way in which we could prove that we had actually written our articles. We went and found an article in which GottaBeMobile had linked to us, and had stated not only our names, but that we were part of Neek Talk. She didn’t even look at the paper.
That’s not even all that happened, but this post is not intended to be a rant. (Therefore, I want to make sure that I point out that there were many other nice people who helped us.) Instead, I am just trying to set the stage as to why we were so frustrated when we reached the showroom floor, where we found at least four young boys around the age of eight - all the boys were wearing a press badge as were many more boys somewhere between the ages of ten and sixteen. Hopefully these boys didn’t go through the hassle that we did. However, this makes me wonder if people were looking at our gender and not our age, especially since we were the only three females which we saw under the age of twenty.
I would hate to think that this is why I was not only almost denied access to CES, but also why there was an obvious lack of female attendees. I hope this is not how things are going to continue.