> the fact that it's true is, itself, a confirmation that (a) institutional sexism exists in our programmer culture
This has nothing to do with the software industry and it has nothing to do with female engineers. It's an "Internet advertising" thing. If you put a picture of a hot girl in your ad, it automatically looks like porn/scam/spam simply because that's what porn/scam/spam advertisers do.
If they were advertising for fashion models would the ads have been rejected? What exactly are these folks at LinkedIn being paid for if not to distinguish spam from legitimate ads?
(Side point - Toptal has 8 dudes and zero ladies on their home page; not exactly a company dedicated to eliminating institutional sexism, AFAICT.)
> That's true, but consider this: the fact that it's true is, itself, a confirmation that (a) institutional sexism exists in our programmer culture, and (b) sexism is pervasive. How strange would it sound to say "that male engineer's handsome picture sure looks spammy"?
Attractive female images are frequently used in marketing both to women or men, and this is not remotely unique to "programmer culture", so the fact that pictures of attractive women in a particular presentation recall underhanded marketing in the minds of members of the "programmer culture" is not much of an indicator of institutional sexism (pervasive or otherwise) particular to that "culture".
Its more a sign that people's mental spam filters are driven by what spam actually uses, which itself reflects marketing more generally, which in this particular area reflects the fact that marketers have found that people generally, regardless of sex, respond well to images of attractive women.
It's possibly the case that among the biological, cultural, and other contributors to that general response are probably some things that could fairly be labelled "sexism", but its certainly not a simple and direct link.
Unfortunately, attractive women are often used on spam ads (dating website). This has nothing to do with the fact that they don't believe they could be engineer, it's about the fact that it look like one of theses spams ads.
Also why do they show attractive women? Why not every type of women and every type of men? I'm curious to see their entire set of pictures and I'm pretty sure we will wee more attractive women than anything else. If there's someone who actually push the stereotype, it's them. They want to attract men using attractive women, like all these dating website ads.
How many times are "computer dudes" hit with pictures of attractive women to encourage us to buy hardware/software, attend conferences, etc?
I think the culprit you should be pointing the finger at is advertisers and marketers, not the average computer programmer (who may or may not be male).
To be honest, it would seem spammy to anyone, not just in our "programmer culture".
But yes, it's sexist. Although to think of it, I often see pictures of ridiculously good looking male in adverts and often unconsciously think "there is no way this guy is an engineer/scientist/...".
I also wonder why advertiser always use good looking people. Personally I respond better to someone that looks friendly and accessible than to some models taking some fishy pose.
> (a) institutional sexism exists in our programmer culture, and (b) sexism is pervasive
I agree with these statements. I think that they needs to select different copy, in light of the sexism in our culture.
Here's what happens when you replace the word "developer" or "engineer" with the word "girl" in the sample copy:
Ridiculous Girls
Girls that cost $0110110001/hour. We invoice in Binary, Try Risk Free!
We Recruit Top Girls
And Bring Them To You Fast! $1800-$2800/wk. Try for 2 Weeks, Risk-Free.
I'm not sure about you, but to me, these ads feel like they could easily be selling sexual services if you don't look closely and notice the words "developer" and "engineer". It's the little things, like capitalizing words in the middle of the sentence, and the use of the term "risk-free", that throw off the heuristics I use to determine the legitimacy of this ad. Imagine if someone saw this ad while looking over your shoulder, didn't look very closely, and all they saw was a pretty face and "$1800-2800/wk".
I think that just asking to change the pictures is a terribly simplistic response, but it probably is enough to bypass the association with sex.
I think that this problem is symptomatic of how adult services have been advertising themselves on the Internet, and symptomatic of the sexism that is pervasive in programmer culture. The knee-jerk shutting down of the ads is probably due to the ads being flagged by viewers, and I think that this is going to be a problem until the culture changes (if it ever does).
One experiment I would have liked seeing (if it wasn't for the account being on the verge of being banned) is whether the ads are still offensive if the women were depicted wearing something that wasn't cut so low (like a suit or even a T-shirt). I know that in reality, many of us go to work in casual clothes, but I think it might have helped.
At some level, yes, but LinkedIn hasn't been particularly welcoming of those sorts of employees in the past (presumably because it makes some of their other customers squeamish).
Plus, there's the issue of whether people are working in the industry willingly (likely not), whether they are subject to violence (probably), and how much of the money you paid they will actually get to keep (very little). (It has been argued that legalization and regulation would solve these issues, but I have no idea if that's true or not.)
Well, it is in fact "unnatural". Seriously, lets cut the PC nonsense; how many gorgeous female software engineers do you know? They are an exceedingly rare breed, and it can be proven statistically considering the low number of females in the industry and cut down further by the low number females in general who would be considered attractive. I have yet to see one myself after ten years.
Perhaps, in the sense that, ignoring the fundamental fallacy of the "natural"/"artificial" divide [0], software and software engineering and people being software engineers are all creations of humans and human culture, and thus would seem to be on what is generally described as the "artificial" side.
> Seriously, lets cut the PC nonsense; how many gorgeous female software engineers do you know? They are an exceedingly rare breed, and it can be proven statistically considering the low number of females in the industry and cut down further by the low number females in general who would be considered attractive.
This logic assumes that being attractive has no correlation to being a software engineer, such that the "low number of females in general who would be considered attractive" is a proper guide for how to reduce the "low number of females in the industry" to find the expected number of attractive females in the industry.
This seems counterintuitive; for one thing, subjective as attraction is, there are things that can be observed about general perceptions of attractiveness and how they correlate with other factors, and higher socio-economic status correlates positively with attractiveness, and being a software engineer has some correlation with socioeconomic status.
[0] Which, of course, there isn't. Humans and everything they produce are, themselves, products of nature.
Note the quotes around "unnatural". I used it only because it was the term used by the parent comment.
Honestly, nothing that you said has anything to do with reality. I challenge you to find one, single male in software development who will say that our industry is even moderately populated with attractive women. We all know that isn't the case. Attractive women don't flock to software development.
And while, yes, beauty is somewhat subjective, it is not 100% subjective across the board. A majority of people would, for example, say that Jenifer Aniston is far more attractive than, say, Sandra Bernhard.
> That's true, but consider this: the fact that it's true is, itself, a confirmation that (a) institutional sexism exists in our programmer culture, and (b) sexism is pervasive. How strange would it sound to say "that male engineer's handsome picture sure looks spammy"? Apparently our stereotypical view of a female engineer is that it's unnatural for them to look so pretty!
Nonsense.
If those ads were for medical services, they'd look like spam.
If those ads were for managerial consulting, they'd look like spam.
If those ads were for educational services, they'd look like spam.
If those ads were for fitness services, they'd look like spam.
Advertisers all over the world learned that generic pictures of pretty women sell product more effectively than generic pictures of pretty men—even when selling to women.
That's why the internet is full of cheap-looking ads with generic pictures of pretty women pasted next to lazy, attention-grabbing text.
Humans are pattern matching machines, and those ads [EDIT: they just removed one of the ads from the post] look just like spam. That's all there is to this story. They make the LinkedIn website look cheap.
> Note that LinkedIn wasn't concerned that they might be spammers. If that were their concern, then LinkedIn wouldn't have offered to reinstate their account in exchange for changing their profile pictures. So the issue is strictly one of physical appearance / stereotypes of female engineers. Hence LinkedIn's concern seems to be that the attractiveness of the photos are either giving an unfair advantage to the profile, or contributing a "noisy" feeling to the results of searches. Yet we wouldn't bat an eye at a similar picture of a handsome male engineer.
LinkedIn wanted the pictures in those spammy ads changed because they don't want their site looking spammy. That's it.
Should companies now fear a western feminist backlash when considering whether to reject advertisements that have generic pictures of pretty women on them? What might be the end result of that be?
