When asked who got cut from his original list, Winkie couldn't remember anyone besides a Kenyan woman who had some sort of government watchdog website and video game designer Roberta Williams. "Basically the ones that weren't necessarily the hot ones were cut." All the information is on a Google Spreadsheet that has since been changed with the current women he said. I've asked him to share it with me, which he hasn't done yet. But, he claims that his editor cut out a "bunch" of people and changed a lot of the copy without telling him.

The timing of the slideshow couldn't have come at a more perfect time, given all the discussion about the terrible treatment women in the tech world so often receive, as a result of the recent controversial firing of developer relations "evangelist" Adria Richards. They're either demonized, like Richards, who a lot of angry anonymous Internet people pounced on for tweeting that a "dongle" joke at a conference was "not cool," which got a man fired. Or, in this case, sexualized. (For more on the terrible nature of this slideshow, Branch has a fun discussion that mostly consists of women tech writers offering their bodies for hire. That's all we're good for, right? ) Interestingly, Complex attempts to rise above that with the following dissonant intro:

Technology has been a boy's club for most of its existence. Just another unfortunate repercussion of the patriarchy. But that's been slowly changing, and over the last decade we've seen a number of wonderful, intelligent, and cunning women make inspiring strides in the field of technology

Winkie says that's his original copy, which would make sense since Complex sold the post with the art at the top of this post and the following tweet:

From Winkie's perspective Complex hit the wrong note on this one. "Complex tries to be innocuous more than anything else, but sometimes they cross the line," he said. But looking back they have a long history of "hottest women" slideshows.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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