"Lipstick? Oh that lipstick. It's nothing really, honey. Yahoo threw a little party and brought in some young women to liven things up. No, no just dancers, honey."
Yahoo has apologized for bringing the "Hack Girls" to the Taiwan Yahoo Developer Network's "Hack Day", a contest in which coders are given 24 hours to develop a web application. VentureBeat reports that the decision to bring the dancers was criticized by observers such as Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake. She tweeted, "For shame, I'm frankly disgusted."
Chris Yeh, head of Yahoo's Developer Network apologized, "the Hack Girls aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit of purpose... Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists."
The first public Hack Day in 2006, by the way, was won by a team of all women coders for an application that automatically blogged photos taken with a camera.