Giving one person the credit for a team effort is wrong. In this case some people are pretending it's right because it's a female, but two wrongs don't make one right.
And yet these discussions, as Matt brings up, generally only occur when there are women involved.
No one's been giving her sole credit for this project, they've been highlighting her as part of the team. She admits that it was a team effort, her team admits it was a team effort and wants people to stop downplaying her accomplishments. Yet the discussion on sites like HN keeps veering into a narrative in which she is being overly credited or attempting to downplay everything she did.
As far as I can tell, despite having been fairly high profile in the past (she gave a TED talk), Bouman is not talking to the media now at all and only made the one Facebook post. The only thing that happened was the publication of the photograph.
She and the team she belongs to have been reasonable. I'm talking about what the media is reporting, since they are exploiting this story just for clicks.
These discussions are the result of the media trying to push a feminist narrative. They chose a female member of the team, and they knew where they were going with it. People can see through it, and are rightly upset.
Harassing her personally is, obviously, not the way to go, though. I'm sure the media doesn't care about her at all, or they are even happy that she's getting harassed, because they now have more stories to run.
> These discussions are the result of the media trying to push a feminist narrative
Because whenever they don't have an agenda to push, they apportion credit for accomplishments with perfect accuracy from the beginning?
It's common for recognition to come from some combination of hard work, intelligence, and luck. When you see people getting all bent out of shape over the luck involved in this case and not in others, you have to wonder why.
You haven't addressed the fact that when someone chooses a male member of the team and gives them undue credit, people don't get upset. Do you really think Jeffrey Snovey was the sole person behind Powershell? That there was no one else on his team that contributed to his project and helped make it a reality? Where was the outrage in that HN thread?
Yet now we have 'the media' pushing a 'feminist narrative' because they're highlighting a woman on the team. Now why would pushing a 'feminist narrative' using your logic cause people to get angry?
Nobody gets upset when a male gets undue credit because that's not seen as following a politised agenda. Whether that's right or wrong, or how we could fix that, that's an entirely different matter.
People get upset when the media pushes a feminist narrative because feminism is a very divisive issue. Talking about a divisive issue drives clicks, interactions, retweets, etc. Especially when you get dismissive with one half of the pie. The only purpose of the media is to piss people off so they can get eyeballs on ads.
Then people are a bunch of bigotted asses. Just because it is their twisted norm in no way makes it acceptable. Less so in fact as it isn't just some rando who thinks it but a social bloc promoting it.
No one's been giving her sole credit for this project, they've been highlighting her as part of the team. She admits that it was a team effort, her team admits it was a team effort and wants people to stop downplaying her accomplishments. Yet the discussion on sites like HN keeps veering into a narrative in which she is being overly credited or attempting to downplay everything she did.