Discussions like this feel very American to me. From a European exaggerated POV, everyone over there wants to either be a victim or fight against discrimination towards a group they are not part of, which always feels like people just seeking attention or making yourself feel good like a white savoir, without solving an actual problem.

At least you actually asked women about their opinion on this image. Fwiw, I just sent the image to my family group and only got two replies so far which were both just a confused "huh why?". To be fair, both are not in CS or even engineering.

Again I think this is due to cultural differences. The image doesn't contain nudity or suggest anything sexual to us over here. It's a woman with an attractive face. A prime example for the difference in perception is how (gun) violence and nudity are perceived in Europe vs the US in movies or games, it's pretty much reversed.

I am in Scotland.

What did you ask. Was it something like "Do you think it might put girls off computing to know for years the main picture used for image processing was a cropped picture from Playboy" (I don't mind you asking a different question, but I'm curious what you asked).

Yes, the image "as is" is fine, but people in the area know where it comes from, and what it is used for.

I asked whether it should be controversial or sexist to use this cropped picture from Playboy as a sample image in computer science. No additional background info or context.

In general the Playboy is not considered "dirty porn" here in Germany which at least in part can be credited to the student movement of the late 60s which among many things addressed sexual self determination. So by some, a woman deciding to be featured in the Playboy or even porn was not seen as degrading but rather the opposite.

What might further surprise people from other parts of this planet is that for example at supermarkets and stores, the section featuring magazines has your typical tech, gaming, glamour magazines right next to ones with boobs on the cover for everyone to see. You see this from childhood on, it is not something bad and horrible and you're not taught that these women are desperate and couldn't find any other way to make money to survive.

I am quite aware that women can be empowered and naked -- that doesn't mean it fits well with tech.

I'm glad women in your life are happy with this, really. I really don't think this is a problem with naked women being shameful, but I really do think it's not appropriate for children. Do teenage girls buy playboy in Germany? I imagine usually not.

Honestly, we might have to agree to disagree, but I really do think using Playboy as a standard image gives the impression this is "for boys", the same way Playboy itself is generally seen as "for boys".

If this was just about nudity being fine, I am not seeing many naked men in tech.

> Do teenage girls buy playboy in Germany? I imagine usually not.

Not that I'm aware of, neither do I know in general which and how many women consume similar media in general. My impression, and I'm not feeling very confident in suggesting this is correct or representative, is that women in general rather like to talk about sexuality related topics with their friends, or for example check out guys together on Facebook etc and not so much look at nudity in a magazine.

> Honestly, we might have to agree to disagree

I'm totally fine with that. :-) I'm not on a mission here, just trying to explain why I feel this is rather an overreaction, and how my cultural background might play a role here... Yes it came from playboy, but the image on its own barely hints at that. At least I never made the connection and only learned about it from the HN comments a few years ago, I think from an IOCCC entry that used that image in some way.

> If this was just about nudity being fine, I am not seeing many naked men in tech.

I'd be absolutely fine with someone using a cropped face from a Playgirl model as a counter weight. :-)

People can be sexist or unwelcoming. An image is just an image, it's an inanimate object, it doesn't have opinions of its own. It's the meaning one attaches to it that can be sexist or not - so it's in the eye of the observer. To me, women and men have the same dignity, conferred by being a human being, so I don't see a picture of a woman as sexist (in the same way that I don't see a picture of a man as sexist). Even nude art images are not sexist. Of course there have been people seeing, even using, images in a sexist way. But this should lead us to condemn those behaviours and those perpetrators. Otherwise it would be akin to saying that kitchen knives are evil because sometimes they have been used to kill people. No, kitchen knives don't have any moral connotation, it's behaviours and people that can be evil (and usually even then, the same person is not pure evil all the time).

EDIT: having said this, if an image is making some people uncomfortable, we can use a different one. But in my view this seems just avoidance, a quick way out, which is going to make the original problem worse in the long term, because sexist people will remain sexist, only less discernible, in "stealth mode".

I agree a single naked image of a woman is not sexist, but why is it that almost every semi-naked image or person I see in tech is female? They are used in advertisements and as "booth babes". If the image wasn't sexist, then there should have been a 50/50 chance of the standard image we use for images being a clipping of a naked man -- but I believe that would never have become a standard image used in CS. I can't prove that, but I strongly believe it.

Regarding tech, I guess it's because it's still a field where (unfortunately) there are more men than women, and since men are attracted to women, advertisement agencies use this fact to capture the attention of the audience. It's these ad people that are sexist or at least using sexual attraction as a leverage. The day a field will have more women than men, they could switch to using semi-naked male imagery (even though there could be different dynamics in play that dictate the rules). The effect is unfortunate of course, because a male dominated field becomes less compelling for women and thus creating a negative spiral.

> They are used in advertisements and as "booth babes"

Hasn't this largely gone away in recent years?

It's still the norm in certain industries (e.g. online casinos), but my impression is that the average tech company doesn't want to be seen as the kind of organisation that hires 'booth babes'.