[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.