Nikon Picked 32 Men

tirediron · Sep 17, 2017

It's a private company doing business as they deem appropriate. Who cares if they invite 32 aardvarks?

terri · Sep 17, 2017

Bill The Lurker said:
am I seeing racist "humor" here? i dont know if zombiesniper slipped the word "slant" in as a slur, but it sure looks like some people are subtly taking it that way

pretty sure racist slurs are not in keeping with tpf policy, nor with tpf's ongoing existence. tread carefully.

Oh, for pete's sake. You seem to be looking for a bogeyman in the lightest utterance, and for some reason feel compelled to hint darkly that things won't go well for TPF if you don't point it out.

But you're really reaching here. Study up on journalistic terms: articles have "slants," news reporters can have "slants" - it's also referred to as a point of view or a bias.

If you have some ax to grind with the forum, feel free to contact me or one of the site owners and get it off your chest. Picking on a member's comments in this accusatory way isn't called for. It's an article about Nikon. Let's stay on topic.

Bill The Lurker · Sep 17, 2017

of course I know "slant" and "slanted" mean askew, good lord. zombiesniper's remark certainly can be and probably are intended exactly as they appear. tomasko's response was cryptic enough that almost any reading is possible, including a "reading in" of a slur. designer's response seemed to evoke a general theme of race when the issue appears to be gender.

so i think i amjustified in wondering, but wondering is all i was doing.. i phrased by remark as a question on purpose, becuse it was a question. were i to insinunate that someone were a racist it would looke more like this: "<name>, you are a racist."

as for the dark insinuations they're not taht dark. i assume the owners of tpf would take pretty agressive action if the place became a safe haven for people wishing to make racist slurs. honestly its only a matter of time before they pull the plug anyways.

zombiesniper · Sep 18, 2017

Bill The Lurker said:
zombiesniper's remark certainly can be and probably are intended exactly as they appear

Do you have a problem with me? If so spill it. This time it's a direct accusation. Lets get your issue out in the open.

Reported.

SquarePeg · Sep 18, 2017

tirediron said:
It's a private company doing business as they deem appropriate. Who cares if they invite 32 aardvarks?

Back on topic.

To answer your question, I care. As a woman and as the mother of a daughter, I care that Nikon seems to think only men can evaluate their gear. Female photo journalists everywhere care that one of the most prominent camera makers doesn't think they're important. If Nikon was using 32 North American landscape photographers for this and they had included no Canadians, and then said oh well we invited 2 but they couldn't make it...

zombiesniper · Sep 18, 2017

I'm going to approach this as logically as I can.

Now having no real numbers as to how many women vs men were invited this is still all just guessing so no real conclusion or solution could be derived without more information.

What do we know. Nikon stated they invited both men and women to the event. Numbers are unclear but we can assume the female numbers were pretty low since a company opportunity like this is pretty sought after. So I'm going to go with the a random number of 5. I choose this number to give the max value I think they could have invited and realistically have non show up. Slim but still possible.

So 32 positions and 5 females invited. Seems pretty low since even if all 5 accepted thats only 15% of the possible position.
From Nikons perspective they may have been trying to hit a realistic percentage balance based on their own male to female ratio which is currently just over 10%. Dunno but it's possible.
Would this be a good approach? Of course not. Nikon themselves have stated that they wish to up their female employee numbers closer to 25%.
So based on this, one would have thought that Nikon would have taken this opportunity to showcase their support of the female market by having a minimum target of 30% female representation.

That's what they could have done but obviously didn't.
Why they didn't will probably never be truly known.

What is known is that the whole photographic community will learn from this. The real question is though, what did they learn?

Did they learn what I think they should have learned? Fair representation of the market you are going for?
Or did they learn to include everyone in every market just so they don't get the social media bomb again?

Hopefully they learned to look closer at the target market and adjust their practices for that market.

Tomasko · Sep 18, 2017

It's not really about representing the market. We're not talking about an industry aimed at a specific gender (like products for women).
It's about not making differences between genders, races etc.
Positive discrimination is as bad as the negative one. They shouldn't "aim for more female employees", they shouldn't care in the first place if you're white, black, green, female or octopus.

If you do an advert and out of 32 people NONE are of the opposite sex, something's probably off and it's a good thing this came to attention.

If they had at least few women in the group, doesn't matter how many, no one would talk about this at all.

zombiesniper · Sep 18, 2017

True but an advertising campaign is always going for a target market.

Braineack · Sep 18, 2017

zombiesniper said:
True but an advertising campaign is always going for a target market.

that's racist.

waday · Sep 18, 2017

Just in case people didn't check, Nikon did respond, and admitted they didn't pay enough attention to female photographers.

zombiesniper said:
True but an advertising campaign is always going for a target market.

Overlooking an entire sex is a pretty big oversight in any advertising campaign.

zombiesniper · Sep 18, 2017

Where did I say it wasn't?

Designer · Sep 18, 2017

zombiesniper said:
True but an advertising campaign is always going for a target market.

Oohh, don't say the "T" word! That's a trigger (oops, there's another!) and you shouldn't use it. Burn your dictionary.

waday · Sep 18, 2017

@zombiesniper, I agree, you didn't say that. What I was responding to was your statement that "an advertising campaign is always going for a target market".

I agree that advertising campaigns always have a target market, the problem with this is then this leaves very little room for Nikon to wiggle their way out (which they didn't, IMO).

The options are essentially:

They were only targeting men, so they purposefully left out women. Thus, they don't care about women; or,
They didn't think about an entire sex by overlooking them entirely. Thus, they don't care about women; or,
They thought enough about it to have some pitiful excuse to say they tried when they really didn't. Thus, they don't care about women.

Had Nikon simply "paid more attention" (using their words, not mine), they could have avoided this whole situation.

The excuse that they tried to get women involved but all the women said no is absolutely laughable.