While the OP was certainly a poor attempt at commiunity engagement, my goodness, what a pit of arrogant, sexist vipers here!!!! Just because someone is a woman doesn’t mean she was just hired to be a pretty face!!! Get over yourselves, if you think that “sexist” marketing applies to you, then it’s YOU who needs an attitude adjustment!
1. I'm not a "arrogant, sexist viper". (though it's possible you aren't talking about me)
2. I didn't say she was hired to be a pretty face! When I first made the sexism remark (page 1), I didn't even know that the OP was the person in the picture, nor did I know that she worked for Tektronix.
Instead, I assumed (correctly, as it turns out) that the OP was someone in sales and marketing from Tektronix. I further assumed that this photo was taken at an event where Tektronix put their oscilloscope in the hands of some people (I assumed that these people
did not work for Tektronix -- at least 1/6 incorrect) and gave them a handbook, a demo board, and an oscilloscope to play with for a short period of time (again, correct).
So far, nothing I've stated or assumed is sexist or problematic. But here began the problems. I assumed (incorrectly) that the person taking the picture was a Tektronix marketing person (perhaps the original poster) because that person's job was to survey the people using the oscilloscopes and make advertising material from their experiences. For all we know, the person taking the photo could be anybody, including being her dad. It's possible that none of this was ever intended to be marketing material (except insofar as the people using the oscilloscopes in the picture were being marketed to).
What lead to my original comment was basically the aforementioned wall of assumptions (both incorrect and correct) and inferring that this overall marketing attempt would/should look like this:
[picture 1]
This is Jimmy. Jimmy says he really loves the big touchscreen on the 8 channel scope.
He says he thought he liked having dedicated knobs for each channel, but once he used
the MSO 58 he realized that he can manipulate traces even more easily with the touchscreen
than with dedicated knobs!
[picture 2]
This is Lee. At work, Lee often has to take many correlated measurements at once. Unfortunately,
most oscilloscopes don't work very well for Lee because he they reduce the sample rate of each
channel by a factor of 2 or 4 as you turn more channels on. This makes Lee mad! The MSO 58
doesn't have this problem: each channel has its own dedicated sampling engine, so turning on
additional channels never reduces the sample rate. Plus, the MSO 58 has 8 channels -- something
that almost no oscilloscopes ever made have had.
[picture 3]
This is Carla. Carla's job is to debug very complicated digital systems involving parallel busses
for multiple processors. Since most oscilloscopes only have four channels plus sixteen digital
channels, Carla often has to use multiple oscilloscopes to make measurements. This makes
Carla very frustrated: it's very hard to maintain good time correlation with multiple oscilloscopes.
But with the MSO 58 from Tektronix, Carla only needs one oscilloscope and she can watch 64 independent
channels with a custom threshold for each channel! Carla thinks the MSO 58 is going to make her
job much, much easier.
Now, I don't mean to pat myself on the back too much here, but
this would have been perfectly acceptable marketing -- and we might have even appreciated it!
But I interpreted what I was seeing (again, laden with the above assumptions -- both incorrect and correct, in hindsight) was something like this:
[picture 1]
This is some person using a Tektronix MSO 58 oscilloscope. There were a bunch of people at the
demonstration event that day, but we're only showing you this one photo because this person
is female and she's the most photogenic person in the room.
This is what I was referring to as sexist (and bad marketing). You aren't selling communicating anything about the product. You aren't selling any stories or experiences. You have told no tales, you have advocated no advantages. You are simply putting the product in the hands of an attractive young woman, and hoping the customer's base lizard brain makes a positive association between the product and attractive young woman.
This is sexism. It might be reverse sexism, I'm not sure. This kind of advertising is absolutely pervasive (at least in the United States).
It's not good for
anybody involved. It's not good for Tektronix, because it's not terribly effective in this case (this technique sells soft drinks, sandwiches, clothes, and all kinds of other products -- but it's not likely to move oscilloscopes). It's not good for the customers (they don't get any information on why they might want this actually quite capable oscilloscope). It's not good for men (whose lizard brains are being exploited). It's not good for women (who aren't being treated equally or fairly as potential customers, and who are (
under the incorrect assumptions above) being singled out of a crowd). After all, their lizard brains might not be equivalently tickled! It's not good for minorities (who aren't represented in this picture or story at all).
No, we already knew many posts ago that it IS her, posted with HER work account. From her replies, I assume she knows more about scopes than about marketing. What’s she supposed to do when taking a selfie in a room of men, masquerade as a man?!?
This comment was borne out of my misunderstanding of the picture of an older woman working for Tektronix with the identical text next to her. I thought that what people were saying was that the original poster
was the older woman (not the woman pictured).
I don't assume anything like that (not that I haven't made a whole host of mistakes assuming this and that already). And of course I don't think she should masquerade as a man -- an idiotic suggestion. What I want to hear is
actual stories of all of the people in that room. What I don't want is
no stories and a picture of the most attractive person in the room. (
note: it's of course possible that I'm more attracted to the other people in the room, but we'll never know because we can't see
their faces!)
On a similar vein: Should a knowledgeable person who happens to be naturally pretty or handsome therefore be prohibited from posting a selfie, because horny, cynical engineers will simply assume that it’s a marketing ploy?!? I think that’s absurd.
And we wonder why more women don’t go into STEM fields... 
0. It's not a selfie!
1. Of course not.
2. I'm not horny or cynical.
3. It
was a marketing ploy -- unofficial and unapproved or not, that much is proven.
And we should wonder why more women don't go into STEM fields, and we should do something about it.
But we can be certain that awful marketing campaigns such as this one
are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And
that is the point I was trying to make all those pages ago.
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