Why is tech show full of men?

As I walked into the chaotic registration zone at the hall hosting Xiaomi’s press conference, my first event of the 2019 Mobile World Congress (MWC), I soon became aware that I looked… different.

I was dressed reasonably smartly and was even dutifully wearing my delegate’s lanyard just like everybody else, even though I hate it – it is too long and I had to tie a knot in it when I realised people were not admiring my belt but trying to read my name.

But, in the sea of people milling around awkwardly, waiting to collect a pass giving them access to the event, my colleague Tracey and I were two of very few women.

It was a woman who gave me my pass. It was also a woman who was pouring out glasses of wine for the reception afterwards. But there were no women speaking inside the hall during the presentation.

We left in a hurry to go to another event across town, hosted by Huawei, the brand everybody is talking about both here in Barcelona and around the world.

Once there, I looked at the long queue snaking round outside the beautiful Italian Pavilion in the heart of Barcelona. I was once again in the minority. Inside, there were no women on stage here either.

I shared a taxi to the next event with analyst Carolina Milanesi, who travels the world attending technology industry events such as MWC. It was the same every year, she told me as we chatted.

“At CES [the Las Vegas technology fair], the thing was booth babes and skimpily dressed people – that’s not the case here but women are in the position of being the hostess, they are smart and look nice but they are serving,” she told me.

“You are either sexually objectified or you are the housewife but you are not seen as making a decision about tech or buying it.”

At my final event of the day, hosted by Microsoft, the organisers had clearly tried to even out the presenters, alternating men and women – although after the first four speakers, there was a succession of men before the next woman joined the stage.

On day one of the exhibition itself, I spent an hour in the priority queue to try out Microsoft’s HoloLens2. Not only was I the only woman in that queue, there were only a tiny handful in the enormous, general queue, which, I heard, was four hours long. The security guard at the front was a woman.

Around the conference halls, I found myself constantly jostled by crowds of men swarming around concept cars, robots and 5G smartphones. Meanwhile, the press officers who were constantly pinging me on email, asking me to meet their exhibiting clients were more likely to be women than men.

Claire, not her real name, is attending MWC for the first time, working for one of the major global brands.