A Party For Biotech People Didn't Have Enough Girls So They Decided To Hire A Bunch Of Models Instead

Bloomberg – “It’s clearly not how women should be portrayed,” Anna Protopapas, chief executive officer at Mersana Therapeutics Inc., said in San Francisco, as she wrapped up a series of meetings. She’d been invited to the LifeSci party, but had instead gone to one of a number of women-only events that have sprung up around the conference in recent years.

Andrew McDonald, founding partner at LifeSci, said that about 1,000 people attended the firm’s bash — a much bigger crowd than last year, the first time they had the models.

“Last year, people were just coming to a cocktail party, and the buzz was generated during the party and afterward,” McDonald said in an interview Tuesday. “Obviously for this event this year, people knew what to expect.”

The [annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference] also offers a revealing look at the industry’s lack of gender diversity. The ballrooms of the Westin St. Francis hotel were packed with rows of men in blue and gray suits. Outside the hotel, where attendees gather for coffee, was about the same — of 47 people sitting on one side of the square outside the conference hotel, two were women. Of those, one was in media relations. There was no line for the women’s bathroom.

“There are the models!” one man yelled.

And, yes, there they were, in matching short, tight, black dresses with shoulder cutouts. It was the second year in a row that New York-based financial communications firm LifeSci Advisors had thrown the party, balancing out a shortage of women in town for the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference with ones who’d been hired to mingle and hold champagne.

The reinforced axles of Jezebel’s outrage bus ran into this story today and naturally were snarkily horrified a biotech firm’s answer to gender diversity being to “throw some models at it.” But frankly they’re doing the right thing. It’s not like they could just snap their fingers and make women suddenly interested in careers in biotech and receive the years of training required to work in it so realistically the only solution is hookers or models at that point. And is there any situation in which adding models into an equation would make a time worse? Maybe if you’re trying to talk about interesting things or think about complicated issues or solve anything besides getting free drinks but besides that I’d say no. Complaining about there being models there is like complaining about an ice sculpture or the table cloths; they’re just a decoration there to fill the estrogenless hole in these guys’ hearts. At least they’re acknowledging that it’d be nice to have more women involved.

AND I don’t see how you can complain because they did in fact try out some male models too:

He also said his firm held an event in June when they hired male models in an effort for gender equality. It didn’t go well.

“It was really awkward,” he said. “The male models were just standing around talking to themselves, and they were relatively young relative to the other men at the party. It created a bizarre feeling they didn’t anticipate.”

See? Not their fault, it’s the male models’ fault. And I fully agree with the assessment. At my old company after we got acquired, my new CEO asked if we would consider hiring some kid going to school at Columbia as an intern and I said I’d take a look at his resumé and think about it. The kid seemed a little older than intern age and I asked why, it turned out he was a male model who had taken years off from school to do that professionally in Europe. He was okay as an intern I guess, not really great but he didn’t get us in trouble for downloading pirate porn so whatever but it was sort of weird having him around being all male modelish. Also he was on J Crew’s site a lot so it creeped us out if anyone bought anything and saw him modeling the product online. Lastly I regularly wondered to myself why my new late 30s party-loving older boss was so buddy-buddy with a male model in his early 20s. I’m sure there was a normal and logical reason but because it was a male model, definitely some questions in my head that you don’t want to have about your fearless leadership. In summation female models: Great, Male models: weird but weirder when a head of your new company asks you to employ them.

(Women of biotech photo by Shutterstock)