Bay Area tech firms draw flak over hiring 'record number' of eye-candy models for holiday parties

That lovely young woman at your tech company's holiday party may profess to be tight with your firm's most-talented software engineer, but she may actually have been hired by your company for your viewing pleasure and a little chitchat.

As Silicon Valley seethes with sexual harassment scandals, tech companies are seeding their holiday parties with paid models, according to a new report.

Several agencies providing models for events said a “record number” of tech firms are quietly paying up to $200 an hour for each model hired to “chat up” party-goers, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

“I find it really highly disturbing,” said Adriana Gascoigne, CEO of Girls in Tech. “It's disappointing and deflating to see this news and see how it's still spreading and how some companies and some people think it's still OK to treat women this way.

“Models come and interact with these awkward male engineers who may not be able to socialize with members of the opposite sex or bring a date. It's like buying women to exploit their bodies and their physical attributes. Women have to work 10 times as hard to prove ourselves in the world, and this doesn't help our cause.”

This coming weekend, the Cre8 Agency will send 25 women and five men, “all good looking,” to hang out with a virtually all-male staff from a San Francisco gaming company, the agency's president told Bloomberg. Officials from the client company went through photos of models, picked the ones they wanted, made them sign non-disclosure agreements, and gave them names of employees they could say they were friends with, so the wouldn't appear to be hired help, Bloomberg reported.

Cre8's president, Farnaz Kermaani, said she visits startup clients before accepting their business, to scope out the environment and help ensure her models are safe.

“If somebody is creepy toward me, and I'm the owner of the company, I can guarantee they'll be creepy to the models,” she told Bloomberg. “Silicon Valley doesn't have the best reputation.”

At Models in Tech, an agency founded three-and-a-half years ago in San Francisco and now headquartered in Los Angeles, CEO Olya Ishchukova said she rejects would-be clients seeking only to add “pretty faces” to predominantly male parties. Her agency's “brand ambassadors” are trained to represent particular companies during events, and may be hired for a tech firm's holiday party for jobs such as checking in guests or running a raffle, Ishchukova told this news organization by phone.

While many Silicon Valley tech companies who approach Models in Tech about holiday parties are seeking models to do specific jobs, gaming companies appear to represent an exception, said Ishchukova, who has a master's degree in public relations from Ulianovsk State University in Russia.

“The video gaming industry is a big one for those parties where they invite female models to hang out with those, they call them ‘geeks' - people who are into games,” she said.

The Bloomberg article made oblique references to Facebook and Google, and referred to “one of the largest search engines in the world.”

Facebook said Thursday that it never hires so-called “atmosphere models.”

“Anyone … we hire has a server or other staffing role,” said Facebook spokeswoman Nora Chan.

Google did not immediately respond to questions about whether it hired models for events.

Holiday parties have become a flashpoint in controversy over sexual harassment. Prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar was alleged to have pawed the leg of an Uber executive at the ride-hailing giant's 2014 “Roaring 20s”-themed holiday bash. A Pishevar defender famously offered what became known as the “pony defense,” saying he couldn't have groped the woman because he had a drink in one hand, and the leash to a pony he'd brought to the party in the other. Pishevar, through his crisis-management professional, has denied the allegation, and others made by women against him.

The claims about Pishevar follow a series of high-profile sexual harassment scandals centered on Silicon Valley tech companies and leading figures, including Uber and venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck.

And over-the-top holiday parties have drawn criticism for Silicon Valley's tech industry in the past, notably after Yahoo in 2015 spent millions of dollars on a “Roaring 20s” bash featuring acrobats and a burlesque troupe.

Meanwhile, the region's tech companies struggle to bring in female employees. Google, which led the way on publicly disclosing diversity statistics, has only 31 percent women in its workforce and only 20 percent in tech jobs.

To Gascoigne of Girls in Tech, tech companies' hiring of models as chatty eye candy hampers the important job of getting women into tech careers - and keeping them in the industry.

“It objectifies the opposite sex,” Gascoigne said. “This is a decision made by the executives in approving the costs of the party. It's a decision that trickles down and hurts all parts of the business. Women don't feel safe. They're not going to feel productive and comfortable in that environment. It's going to make them want to leave.”