[Canadauni]

The quote that you included as part of [1] doesn't seem to be present in the article you linked.

Getting down to your question I am not sure the fault lies with those who are wondering about the difference between two opposing statements in the media. The piece I take issue is that as soon as the picture of her with the image of the black hole started to go viral the first thing many people did was check her contributions to a repo on github to quantify the code that she wrote for the project as a way to measure her which ultimately seems like something someone would do out of feelings of inadequacy.

[azeotropic]

"which ultimately seems like something someone would do out of feelings of inadequacy."

Given that those who counted LoC ultimately had the correct view -- that the initial viral story was not accurate -- perhaps they deserve a little more credit than that. It's kind of a 'low blow' to suggest the critics could only care because they don't 'measure up' -- if you know what I mean. You seem to have a rather ironic notion of the source of virtue, given the present controversy.

I agree though, that LoC is a lousy metric. This is a case where a concise algorithm might still have been essential.

[anjc]

My mistake, it was in the other article I linked to.

Her current/future employers, her colleagues, and every academic's employers and colleagues, want to know contributions. Some fields make you explicitly list them for each paper. No doubt feelings of inadequacy feed into this at some point, but it's part of the job and isn't saved for just measuring women.

[Canadauni]

Thanks for clearing that up. To my point about contributions, I was more speaking about how people went directly to look at the code contributions in lines of code measured by github in order to measure her specifically. I agree that it is important to appropriately assess and acknowledge contributions in academic work but pure volume of code written (which doesn't always correlate with what github counts) doesn't necessarily quantify the contributions to an academic work.