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.
crazygringo|5 years ago
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|5 years ago
Let’s focus on real things, not on this phony issues!
anchpop|5 years ago
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.
hombre_fatal|5 years ago
[deleted]
enriquto|5 years ago
NoSorryCannot|5 years ago
KarlKemp|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
rotskoff|5 years ago
pkulak|5 years ago
pkulak|5 years ago