Comedy show pokes fun at Silicon Valley's diversity problem

Sheryl Caveberg is a cave woman, explaining the concept of "Lean In" to fellow cavemen in a skit intended to show gender equality is easy enough to be conceived by a caveman in the Paleolithic era. “Me tell men to lean in,’” she yells, while crouching along the ground.

The Sandberg skit was one of several gender inequality-inspired sketches that took center stage for one night on Tuesday at San Jose’s Montgomery Theatre. The comedy sketch titled "Night of the Living Data" was performed as an after-party alternative to the annual Hadoop Summit, which was taking place at the San Jose Convention Center.

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Written and inspired by former tech workers, San Francisco-based comedy troupe Killing My Lobster performed for a full audience to benefit the nonprofit Girls Who Code.

“I’ve been going to tech conferences for a bunch of years and it’s one of the places you see the gender gap play out visually,” said David Fishman, vice president of marketing at San Mateo-based Arcadia Data. Fishman said he came up with the idea for the show.

“Conferences are critical to networking, and when you’re in a relatively tiny minority, it’s hard to network and build out your professional cred(it),” Fishman said. “So that kind of drove me to say, 'What can we do to make tech’s gender gap more prominent but also more interesting — a more welcoming environment.' If we’re going to do something about this, we have to put it in front of people.”

Millie Debenedet, executive director of "Night of the Living Data," said the writing team had so much material that they ended up having to cut about 40 skits. “One of our main focuses in our work is to take a comedic lens on this touchy subject that nobody wants to talk about. Unfortunately there was way more material."

Arcadia Data produced the show, with sponsors including Cloudera, Intel (Women in Big Data), MapR, Paxata, Pivotal, Qubole, Rackspace, Simba Technologies and Zoomdata.

Most skits were very funny and disturbingly accurate — a handful of them were laugh-out-loud funny. The writing portrayed characters with smart, witty and comedic depictions of common Silicon Valley scenarios like casual demeaning comments made to female colleagues.

Skits poked fun at office culture like when a male asked a female coworker to order lunch, calling her “dear,” to which the woman started acting like an actual deer as she began crawling on the floor with fingers as antlers. Another skit showed a woman coming up with a dance titled “the tech shuffle,” which the female characters would do when they experienced an unwanted advancement by a male colleague and wanted to scare them away.

Ironically, earlier that morning multiple people reported that Hadoop Summit's opening remarks featured scantily-clad women dancing with violins on the main stage.