Silicon Valley giants have been fighting to overhaul the industry’s toxic “bro” culture following allegations from women who say they have been sidelined or abused.
In her book Brotopia, the journalist Emily Chang said that men in Silicon Valley “think they are above the law because they think they are changing the world”.
She wrote that the tech industry’s “secretive, orgiastic dark side” from the “drug-fuelled orgies to the freewheeling sex lives pursued by men in tech have consequences for how business gets done in Silicon Valley”.
Responding to the photo of the Palo Alto Networks’ hostesses on LinkedIn, one person wrote that “women in male-dominated industries are forced to endure so much objectification and ‘jokes’ made at the expense of our gender”.
Another wrote: “‘Booth Babes’ went away in the early 2000s, which was way later than it should have been.”
Mr Arora said that the company launched an investigation into “how the error occurred and addressed the issue within our event team and the entire marketing organisation”.
Some argued on social media that the apology read like it was from “a teenager being forced to apologise by their parents” as it did not specifically mention the sexism and misogyny the company had been accused of.