Any hopes of a march towards an eradication of sexism in the tech industry were dealt a blow over the weekend courtesy of two 'brogrammers' and a rather dubious app idea.
Jethro Batts and David Boulton took to the stage at Techcrunch Disrupt 2013 to unveil 'Titstare' - an app full of people "staring at tits".
Why? Because "looking at breasts was directly linked with having a good healthy heart, but woman just aren't that warm to it", according to its creators.
The infamous Titstare app
TechCrunch, who were hosting the event, issued an immediate apology and sought - unsurprisingly - to distance themselves as much as possible from Titstare.
On their website they wrote:
Normally our hackathons are a showcase for developers of all stripes to create and share something cool. But earlier today, the spirit of our event was marred by two misogynistic presentations.
Sexism is a major problem in the tech industry, and we’ve worked hard to counteract it in our coverage and in our own hiring.
Today’s issues resulted from a failure to properly screen our hackathons for inappropriate content ahead of time and establish clear guidelines for these submissions.
Trust us, that changed as soon as we saw what happened at our show. Every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward. Any type of sexism or other discriminatory and/or derogatory speech will not be allowed.
You expect more from us, and we expect more from ourselves. We are sorry.
Batts and Boulton took to Twitter to offer an apology of sorts:
But this was not enough to pacify the masses:
More worryingly from the offending duo's point of view was the amount of people promising never to work with them again.
So what they thought was just a "fun Aussie hack" may have cost them their careers...