I think a big problem is that this guy doesn’t seem to want to have more women in his career field because he wants them to contribute in their own way, but rather wants to have sex with them. :\

My ex-wife is a very successful programmer but has had to face all kinds of discrimination and obstacles, from the day she entered the IT faculty. She was the only female in a group of males. And the harassment was pretty much constant. It was shown in small details, sometimes, which can seem trivial but were very off putting for her. For instance, there were no toilets for female students, only mixed ones. You can imagine the filthiness of them after a day of male students going there… She was getting mad about it but they were just laughing at her.

Unfortunately this is so true and not just in the IT industry. The sexism and racism in this world is bad, it is getting better each generation, but its not fast enough. Our world would be a better place if we could eliminate all forms of discrimination.

Thanks for the elaboration.

As one clarification, I do not mean to argue that things should change or not simply due to tradition. All I wanted to note there is that a tradition does exist, which one way or another results in the tendency for changes to be slowed down, not as an individual’s choice but due to a large group’s slow convergence.

@ fundamental:

Here is why the image is problematic:

– The picture is a cropped version of Playboy centerfold and many professors/presenters are fond of mentioning this fact as an anecdote. While it does not contain explicit nudity, it is certainly sexualized image. The fact that nudity was removed by cropping does not really change the fact that the original was intended to be suggestive. As such it doesn’t really have place in a professional setting. Think of it as of that SFW Pr0n meme in which people take explicit pornographic images and MS-paint clothes over them to make them appear as something else. But everyone knows what these images are. This is kinda like that. Even though there is no nudity there, the intent of the photograph was still to objectify the model for the benefit of the male gaze.

– The use of a playboy centerfold as a test image makes the presentation seem targeted primarily at heterosexual males. This is a form of othering. Women and non-heterosexuals in the audience may feel excluded. They know they are not the target audience of the implied “wink, wink, nudge, nudge – you can check out the full image after class” thing.

– The Lena image features stereotypical model pose by a conventionally attractive woman and it plays into body image concerns.

– It has been criticized by prominent women in the field including Dianne O’Leary who said:

If a professor makes a sexist joke, a female student might well find it so disturbing that she is unable to listen to the rest of the lecture. Suggestive pictures used in lectures on image processing are similarly distracting to the women listeners and convey the message that the lecturer caters to the males only. For example, it is amazing that the “Lena” pin-up image is still used as an example in courses and published as a test image in journals today.

That’s sort of the gist of it. The fact that it has nice textures and makes a good image is inconsequential since it should not be difficult to find another image that has similar properties. The argument that it is a “tradition” is also moot, because traditions that are are inconsiderate or discriminatory should not be perpetuated. The fact that a lot of men in the field completely disregard all of these concerns and immediately write them off as silly nitpicking is an example of the deeply internalized sexism in our field. It’s very hard to make our industry more welcoming to women if every time someone points out a problem area we immediately dismiss it and keep doing what we were doing.

@ joek:

Thank you. That’s exactly the point. From what I gather the image is still fairly popular. I still see it cropping up online all the time. When I took a grad school level image processing back when I was working towards my masters we spent almost an entire semester processing Lena in a myriad of ways. And the professor explained in detail the history of the image.

The problem with the Lenna image, Fundamental, is not so much that it’s of a PlayBoy centrefold, but that it’s clearly a photo used for the fanservice. While it is (allegedly — I’m not involved in image processing, so I don’t really know) true that the image contains a sufficiently wide range of colour and shading or whatever for it to be a useful test image, it’s still giving off the message that the only use women are in the field is to act as eye-candy for the (implicitly heterosexual) men. When asking why women are put off from STEM, it’s simplistic to say that it’s because of the overt sexism — while that is a problem, it’s not acknowledging the institutional and internalised sexism one sees in the field. Just using the image as an industry standard is giving off the message that this is a field in which we objectify women, whether or not white middle class males are aware of it…

I find it interesting that you bring up the Lenna test image. I heard about the origin story once before, though to be honest it seemed like a rather inconsequential and somewhat comical (due to it’s taboo nature) piece of trivia. Certainly this can lead to some unequal footing and some people being bothered by it, though the context that it lives in is certainly key. In all the cases that I’ve seen it used it would work approximately as well if the human element was completely removed and only a floating hat with perhaps a wig was left. This could be seen as an argument to replace the image with something else, but the Lenna image has quite the bit of inertia behind is as IMO it seems to demonstrate some very nice textures and contrasts from a purely mathematical perspective. This may simply be my own biases, but from what I can tell, something like that image as it is used within the community that I have observed can in the worst case only serve as a catalyst to bring out ill founded attitudes that were there to start with.

@ Victoria:

I think part of the problem is that the sexism is often indirect. As you said yourself, you sort of need to “become one of the guys” and sometimes have to put co-workers in place when they get out of line. This is unfortunate. Men who enter the IT field do not need to face this type of pressure to fit in or to constantly feel like they need to prove they can do the job just as well as any of their coworkers. Or that everything that they do reflects on their entire gender.

Often this sort of discrimination is not out of malice, but simply a result of ignorance and misinformation. That of course doesn’t make it any less wrong or hurtful. Which is why I think it’s important to call out people like Dave Winer on when they are being shitty on the internets.

Well, I am not a programmer per se, but I am a woman in IT industry :) When I started my education in the university, the male/female student ratio was 50/50. When I was graduating, there were 3 of us girls left for the fifth year. That proportion has held up until recently. Have I ever faced blatant sexism directed at me? Almost never. Why? I’m rather intimidating in person. So much actually that my fellow colleagues supress in their minds the whole aspect of my being a girl. There was an amusing couple of times when the guys started with the jokes and I was like, well, hello? And they went with surprised ‘but you’re one of the dudes’. So when such people can’t ‘sexism you out’, they ‘forget’ you’re a girl :)

But: on the positive side – I am a lead for a small front-end team, and two of five are girls (not counting me). So, it’s gonna be better. The process is slow and painful, but it’s not dead.