The Rest of the Lenna Story

[1] http://phys.org/news180024084.html

Someone else has already shared some formal research on how other "in-group" signals have exactly this effect. I don't think it's much of a stretch to suggest that "public consumption of heterosexual-male-targeted erotica" could have a similar effect. But even without that research, the fact is that plenty of women have been very explicit that nude or sexual images in the workplace make them feel unwelcome, unequal, and in some cases even threatened. Regardless of the deep causes of those reactions, the experience is undeniably real for the people who report it. And that comes back to the parent poster's point: if your company environment welcomes nude or erotic imagery without good reason, many women will choose not to work with you.

Finally, you ask whether it's unfair for one culture ("women", broadly speaking) to project its own cultural norms onto another ("computing", in this case). I see two answers. First, the pure capitalism that some folks here are fond of: if your company's atmosphere tends to push away talented female employees and your competitor's does not, they'll be more successful at drawing on that talent pool, eventually giving them a big advantage. (One could probably extend that reasoning to entire industries or societies with a little work.) And second, a social justice perspective: not all norms are morally equivalent. The classic example is that slavery used to be a perfectly accepted norm, but few today would argue that it was wrong for the abolitionists to seek to change it. I'd like to think that one day our social context will have shifted enough that nude images in the workplace will have the same impact on men and on women, but we aren't there now and it's hard to imagine it happening in my lifetime (or even two or three generations down).

[Oh, and one more point, since it's something that took me years to catch on to: as a guy, I'm very cautious these days when it comes to deep theorizing about why women (or other underrepresented groups) might feel the way they do about issues like this. The thing is, while trying to reason out all this stuff is just an intriguing intellectual exercise for me, for women it's their constant reality. And let me tell you, there's no upside to taking someone who's obviously unhappy about something and trying to dispassionately pick apart what exactly about it is bothering them. In the end, it's almost always more productive to simply say, "Wow, thanks for letting me know you feel that way. What can we do to make it better?"]

But it sounds like you're addressing the broader issues just like I was: you suggest that you might not want to work with someone who was "uptight about that sort of thing". All I can offer is this: I've heard multiple stories from female engineers at tech conferences who have had trouble getting attendees to talk to them because everyone assumed they were just there as some sort of booth babe. It can't be good for their companies to have an engineer's time wasted in that way, and it's certainly not good for the women's careers if they're unable to network as effectively as their male peers. I won't try to claim that I can nail down a specific causal chain, but it seems pretty clear that a culture that routinely uses women purely as attention-getting devices or for visual enjoyment would naturally tend to undermine women who work in technical roles in this way. And when you drive away or devalue half of the potential talent pool just because a few guys don't see it as a problem, that's a bad thing.

[Oh, and a side note to whoever is downvoting out there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3782124 I'm open to the suggestion that my comments in this thread have "provided no substance or insight", but I'd love to know why. If you just happen to disagree with my point (or anyone else's), that's not what the Hacker News downvote button is for.]