Every awards show is a bit of bullshit and a bit of a mess. At their messiest, you get Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars, and on an average night you may get an interruption by Kanye, a streaker, or this “Face Off” between me and my fellow Women 2.0 Award winner, Ina Fried.

The 2014 Crunchies were definitely on messiest end of the spectrum. This is the eighth time we’ve hosted the annual awards ceremony, and we’re having growing pains.

Though I wasn’t offended by much of host T.J. Miller’s Dadaist humor, attendees like Twitter VP of Global Media Katie Stanton are right in balking at the “bitch” and “rape” comments and a general off-putting atmosphere. This year’s ceremony should have been clearly defined as being “18 and over.“ We did not do that and that’s our failure, in addition to some other touch points. 

In the US, gender, sexuality and race are legally protected categories. They are topics worth treating with care, so we, both TechCrunch editorial and TechCrunch events, flagged T.J. after the first shaky interaction with an audience member. He had never done a big awards show, and acted like he was at a comedy club, dealing with hecklers.

But I do not think it was T.J.’s intent nor TechCrunch’s intent to offend an entire gender or race by producing the Crunchies. We are a team led by women, including myself, Susan Hobbs and Leslie Hitchcock, who want more than anything else to see more women in tech, including onstage at our events. I’m sorry that did not happen here.

We should have demonstrated much more awareness of our community and responsibility as we planned our run of the show. As the tech sector charges forward and billions of dollars are up for grabs, fed-up white women as well as women and men of color continue to be left out.

If not having enough diversity onstage, in the audience, and in tech in general is the real problem, then let’s address it. You could say VCs don’t fund women, but VCs say they simply don’t meet enough women and/or minority founders. Everyone shifts the blame to someone else.

We asked many women, including Katie Stanton, to present awards this time, and they said no. This is reflective of an industry-wide question: How do we get more of us to show up onstage? To VC meetings? To partner interviews? Successful women like Katie and Sheryl Sandberg and Susan Wojcicki are oversubscribed.

And while her overall point that women should be treated with respect, at tech events and beyond, is something I’m passionate about, I did not agree with Katie’s conflating of Jordan Crook’s “hooha” comment as hostile. It was an improvised, non-scripted exchange on the controversial Airbnb logo. And Jordan, who is gay, was neither pejorative or anti-woman with her “I like hooha too” quip.

Are we never supposed to talk about our bodies or sex in this brave new equal world?

The environment at last night’s Women 2.0 Awards was the opposite of the Crunchies. One-fifth the size of the Crunchies, that event, held at the Kabuki Theatre with a small audience of mostly women, was mostly positive and supportive, and no one got called a bitch (though it too had its detractors).

The difference between the two shows is best expressed in the comparison of the two awards: ours, a gnarly bro-monkey wearing no pants, and theirs, an elegant glass sculpture of an arrowhead. Something you could display in your house.

So how do we make our show look more like theirs?

Perhaps we do the math beforehand: Should we say, “We need 50% women presenters, at least 50% women nominees on stage”? (At the Women 2.0 Awards, 85% of the winners were women, and the earth did not crack open and swallow us all.) This would be one way to fight the self-fulfilling prophecy of stereotype threat.

Sure these proportions do not reflect the fact that women are 10% of Venture Series A investment, 6% of partners in VC. But if that’s not “fair,” neither is current state of affairs: Lots of noise on Twitter, while we continue to not get our companies funded. It’s easier to favorite a tweet than to hire a female General Partner.

Like Megan Smith, America’s new CTO, who accepted the “Unstoppable” award yesterday, I believe one solution is to keep as visible as possible as members of underrepresented groups, to “debug unconscious bias” in Smith’s words.

If Katie Stanton and the Katie Stantons of the world stay away from the Crunchies next year, there will be one less woman on stage, one less woman accepting an award, one less woman to look up to. That’s moving backwards, and I might be willing to give up an edgy “hooha” joke to avoid it.