[crazygringo]

Seriously. People wonder why there aren't enough women in CS.

Things like the canonical test image being a sexy "come hither" look, coming from a Playboy centerfold, definitely don't help.

And it's not enough to say "well the rest of the centerfold isn't shown". Come on. We all know the source of the image.

And "tradition" is far less important than CS being a welcoming environment for all people.

Computer science is a profession. Let's use images that are appropriate for a professional setting.

[nisuni]

As a woman in CS I couldn’t care less about Lena.

Let’s focus on real things, not on this phony issues!

[brnt]

Passing an indifference test should however hardly be the right bar to clear for a field of research.

[nisuni]

My point is: people (often, males) like to speak in the name of all women when it comes to Lena.

It’s offensive, it keeps women out of CS, it’s a symbol of the patriarchy, etc...

As woman, I am saying this is not the case, at least not for THIS woman: I’ve never felt excluded because of Lena, my CS studies were not impeded by Lena in any way, I have actually used Lena’s image for a small project.

Of course I would accept someone saying that the image offends someone (better if this point is substantiated by evidence) but I absolutely reject people speaking in the name of all women, an saying that Lena offends all women. This is not true!

[brnt]

Finding a person not offended does not mean an image does not contribute to a particular environment, or is an example of it. The image need not be offensive to most or even many for it to be true.

Also, be careful not to attack a strawman: the issue is of course not just the image.

As a man I experienced plenty of unpleasant conversation about women, conversation which might be referred to as men-talk or some such. Also, I'm not competitive at all, while many men would identify that as manly behavior. One of the few women in my university program confided that this (usually unfounded) self-assuredness was very annoying and a huge turn-off, a feeling we both shared, but would have been regarded as an essential ingredient to participating in that program.

Of course, such issues are also present in the reverse. My wife had similar conversations but about men amongst some female colleagues. Fortunately, we've met enough people to not have to settle for such juvenile views/conversations. I can absolutely see how a woman would find it very difficult to be comfortable in such an environment however, when I didn't even feel part of that mildly macho culture.

Just because something is 'anti-women', does not mean it can only bother women. Our cultures associate many things to gender, which in my view is a leftover of centuries past and we would do well to remove that sort of association. Maybe then, a picture of Lena wouldn't represent a (sub)culture so accurately and be therefore an indicator of the problem.

[nisuni]

I have my evidence that Lena is not harmful to women, at least to this woman. It’s one data point, but better than zero.

You are making a much stronger claim without evidence. How is Lena harmful? How many women did Lena drive out of CS?

Do you have some proof, some data, besides neo-Marxist crap such a intersectionalized mysoginistic oppression?

It reminds me of that video that showed that college students are outraged by stereotypical Mexican Halloween costumes, but actual Mexicans are fine with it.

Are you fighting for women, or for your ego?

[brnt]

If you disqualify my experience but hold your own as a valid data point, I guess we are done.

[anchpop]

I don't have any hard stats, but I'm going to try to talk about my experiences. I took a programming class in highschool - it was almost all boys at the time. This resembles my programming classes in college, and the professional environments I've worked in. Crucially, none of us back in highschool had ever even heard of Lena when we signed up for the class, and I doubt very many of the girls who decided not to take it had heard of Lena either.

It feels to me like there's some deeper reason for the gender disparity in tech than Lena. I don't have any issue with changing the picture whatsoever - I'm sure we can find some other picture to use as a baseline (big buck bunny?). But I would be willing to bet that it will do precisely nothing to change the fact that there aren't very many women in CS.

I can think of many other factors that seem more plausible to me. Me and my friends were into minecraft - at the time, you installed minecraft mods by overwriting files inside the minecraft.jar. If you wanted to set up a minecraft sever, you were given some command-line program to run and you had to set up port-forwarding in your router. Just doing this stuff makes you more comfortable with computers, and makes the jump to "I want to start programming" seem much smaller than someone who has never stepped outside Chrome and MS Office. And PC gaming is much more popular among young men than young women, so this avenue of becoming comfortable with the computer is going to be much more accessible to men. Not to mention, if you like games, eventually you'll want to make one - I think every PC gamer has at least thought about installing Unreal and trying to make their dreams into reality. I think if we actually want to increase how many women are in CS (and nothing would make me happier), this is the kind of stuff we should be thinking about, not whether image processing programmers use a picture of an attractive woman with bare shoulders too often.

[brnt]

I don't think the argument I'd that stopping using Lena is a silver bullet. The argument is that the image reflects a particular culture, one that not only women, but women in particular on average find uninviting. Personally I have similar feelings about the sexy calenders in some car workshops. It's just a bit too much irrelevant display of ones preferences.