[yodon]

The first part of the scenario, where one scientist is held up as responsible for a large team's discovery, has played out in every Nobel Prize for experimental work in the past fifty years. That's how science works and everyone who does science professionally knows this. The second part of the scenario, where the internet goes wild and declares this a horrendous miscarriage of credit, happens only when the leader of the team is female. It is not a miscarriage of credit. It is how scientific teams are credited and how they have always been credited, by personifying the collective work through the persona of the leader of the team. There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny.

[daenz]

>There is nothing new here except the application of misogyny.

No, the new thing here is pretending that this only happens to women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies

Look at how many of those controversies are over people not being recognized for the credit, specifically in Physics and Chemistry. Women experiencing this phenomenon is not "misogyny", it's par for the course.

[yodon]

Of course controversy over credit exists. Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies.

I've known and worked with perhaps half a dozen Nobel Prize winners, and dozens of their students, collaborators, and post docs, including some cases where the list of names on the Prize has been at best debatabely correct. That is the reality of large science. It always has been. What is new is the weaponization of misogyny.

[blub]

Having missed the main discussion, and getting the chance to see additional info become available, it seems that the critics were right, even if they perhaps had ignoble reasons to complain, as you claim.

There were apparently 30 people involved, four algorithms, one of which belonged to the main character of our story and in the end that algorithm was not used, according to one of her colleagues :)

[yodon]

All I can say is I am sorry you have fallen prey to that narrative. It is not uncommon for large science to involve not 30 people but hundreds, and not four algorithms but dozens. In the end, science still talks about the work as having been done by an individual, just as we say that Steve Jobs created the iPhone. Everyone involved understands that Steve Jobs didn't solder the battery connectors or write the display driver. What he did was make the project happen. The same is true in science, particularly in large science. There is nothing new here except misogyny. Your favorite male experimental Nobel Prize winners of the past 50 years also worked with large teams and also didn't write all the code on their projects. That's how large projects work and how large research efforts are personified.

[daenz]

>Please post links to the high traffic outraged threads on HN in connection with those controversies.

Honestly, take the time and read the comments and see how similar they are to the Katie Bouman "outrage": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15395347

[yodon]

First, I know Art McDonald, the scientist in question in that thread, and I do consider leading a large project to be a critical element of the project's success. Second, the quality of the discussion in that thread was much higher and the level of angry, punitive downvoting much lower (elsewhere in this thread I was downvoted currently to -2 for asserting that trolling != misogyny, an assertion that I think would be supported by every online and offline dictionary definition of the terms and is a measure of the emotional rather than rational factors driving much of this debate). Controversy over credit is not new. Weaponized misogyny driven outrage is. [edit added: Also thanks for finding and posting that link, it is a relevant component to include for comparison, even if we disagree on the conclusions to be drawn from it]

[brianpgordon]

My guess is that what most people are instinctively turned off by is the clickbaity element that they see as implicitly in play when a headline reads "meet the woman behind X" instead of something more generic like "meet the researcher behind X." In the former case, the headline writer is going beyond the standard obnoxious media spin that likes to oversimplify the research process and also apparently hitching their wagon onto the "women in STEM" angle to get more clicks. It's just even more over-the-top than normal, and people are put in an especially critical, even dismissive, frame of mind right off the bat.

That said, I think it's fairly uncharitable to read the headline that way, and we shouldn't jump to conclusions about the author's intent when it's so ambiguous. But it's also uncharitable to read some kind of sinister latent misogyny into HN reactions critical of the headline.