The 'Lena' thing always seems to me like 'mountain out of a molehill'. Sure, there's something there, but of all the things you could worry about... Honestly it

The 'Lena' thing always seems to me like 'mountain out of a molehill'. Sure, there's something there, but of all the things you could worry about... Honestly it seems to me like its persistence tells us rather little. Benchmarks have always had long lives by nature- just look at dhrystone, which has declined tremendously in relevance, but is still run plenty often today. I'm not saying it is an appropriate image. Rather, at this point its continued use could easily be thanks simply to inertia rather than crushing sexism. However, I don't work in image processing so I can't say for sure.