Following allegations of sexism and gender bias, the Consumer Technology Association said Tuesday it would officially sanction sex tech companies, allowing them to show their products at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
Sex techwill be included under the Health and Wellness category at the 2020 CES in Las Vegas, one of the world’s most influential tech expositions. The products must be new or emerging tech to be displayed at the show and compete for awards, CES’ organizers said.
The Consumer Technology Association said that it decided to legitimize sex tech’s presence at the show after a controversy surfaced during the 2019 CES show in January. A women’s sex toy won an innovation award but CTA revoked the award, citing how the product didn’t fit into existing product categories and that “entries deemed by CTA in their sole discretion to be immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA’s image will be disqualified.” In May, CTA relented and returned the award to the vibrator company.
The vibrator initially competed in the robotics and drones category. At past CES events, other sex tech products would be slotted into whichever category seemed most relevant, including robotics and digital wellness.
The new policy was made in direct response to this year’s vibrator controversy, explained Jean Foster, CTA’s senior vice president of marketing.
“That’s why we’re doing it,” Foster told CNN Business. “We’ve been really open about how we didn’t handle it well and we apologized publicly … and it caused us to revisit this and say, we should look at this as a technology.”
The CTA said the new policy will be trialed for a year, noting that every new policy at first exists on a trial basis
“Even at CTA, sometimes a technology comes out that we haven’t expected and we haven’t the rules to deal with,” said Karen Chupka, executive vice president at CTA. “This is one of those things that caught us off guard. So that’s why every year we try to go back and see what can we do better.”
The CTA announced changes to its dress code, banning sexually revealing clothing at CES. The association also said it would invest part of its $10 million investments budget into two venture capital funds dedicated to diversity.
