Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier, as at one point the thread was flagged and new replies were disabled.

These interpretations are really valuable in identifying how a lot of these original comments may well be clumsy attempts at delivering a compliment, often from men who might feel as if they're walking on eggshells. On the other hand, the reason I posted is that even where such comments are well-intentioned, they can often signal a discounting of the female colleague's other abilities.

I've become more sensitive to this since an experience a couple of years on a film I was working on. Film sets are broadly gender-neutral. sure, there are more female make-up artists and male grips and camera operators, but those tend to be reflective of cultural and physical differences rather than institutionalized (more women have experience of dealing with makeup from an early age, it's easier for men to wrangle heavy lighting equipment or weighty 35mm cameras). I've met many people of the opposite gender to the one that might be expected, and the general attitude is 'if you know what you're doing it doesn't matter who you are.' I've never heard anyone express the idea that women can't be cinematographers, or this or that.

However, on this project, we had an actress who was cast in a sort of femme fatale role, and her best known credit was an appearance in a highly sexualized context on a cable TV series. And she was very, very hot - she's appeared as a model in a variety of men's magazines (the sort where they show hot women in expensive bikinis or underwear rather than actual nudity). To my surprise, a ton of people, including some other women, projected all their stereotypes of the 'bimbo' image on this actress and though everyone was formally polite (as far as I could tell) She was discussed int he abstract as nothing more than a hot body, along with general critiques of her intellect, acting ability and so on.

I had little contact with her during the shoot (short schedule + working as a department head = constantly busy), and my impression at the time was that she was perfectly smart but very stressed, which I put down to the working atmosphere that was created around her (and which was different on days when she wasn't on set - you get a feel for these things). The final straw was on the last evening, when there was a fight/action scene in which she was involved. As soon as she showed up, the lead actor just stood up and explained how it should all go down and how he would do all the work etc.

I didn't blow a gasket about it because we had a limited amount of time, although I remonstrated with the producers and director about it, but they didn't want to slow things down. I wasn't remonstrating to be noble, but because the actress had black belts in more than one martial art, had studied in China, and had numerous credits as a fight coordinator, far more experience in this specialization than anyone else on the set. She also had a degree cum laude from a prestigious university in a challenging subject and a bunch of other accomplishments, and yet most of the cast and crew were treating her as little better than a mannequin.

tl;dr many of the original comments might have a positive intent, but unfortunately it's all to easy to be positively dismissive of someone's actual abilities without really intending to.