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I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked

I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and there is practically never any comments about this. For once a woman gets credit and this thread is full of people complaining that there was an entire team. Yes, there was a team, but that doesn't matter. For once a woman is getting credit for the great work they've done and this should be applauded. Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields. Anyone who is complaining about the lack of fairness in this is making themselves look ignorant by ignoring the last thousand years of scientific progress.

dunslandsboo 8y ago
Why do you want to change the behaviour of women regarding their choice of study field?
- juliendorra 8y ago
  You misunderstood. We want any person, women and young girls included, to be able to pursue a career path, if they have even the faintest desire of it, without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly, or having to cope with various forms of harassment. If you build an environment that allow that, women presence in the field surge. And then you see retrospectively that many women wanted to try this field, but it was really the field that didn’t want women to try. Because, as you will probably agree, desire for a career is not natural destiny, it’s the result of many factors including avoiding being hurt.
  - hurryskurry 8y ago
    In more equal societies women tend to choose STEM less though
  - dunslandsboo 8y ago
    Maybe you can help me understand. So how do you explain why there are fewer women in STEM fields in Scandinavia and more in Turkey, Tunesia and United Arab Emirates? Well at least according to the paper "The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Gijsbert Stoet, David C. Geary" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719?journalCode=pssa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...
    - frostburg 8y ago
      Do you realize that women aren't a monolithic group? Various effects can be at play at the same time - women preferring on average other kinds of work isn't an argument in favour of discriminating against those that do not.
    - njepa 8y ago
      Scandinavia has hundreds of years of mostly unbroken history in STEM. It is literally the home of the Nobel prize. It isn't really comparable to nations that have rapidly shifted their workforce and industries more recently.
    - roguecoder 8y ago
      That is some just-so-story that doesn’t present a disprovable hypothesis. There was a better-supported causal hypothesis floating around that exposure to the internet, in particular, turned women off of CS because the culture #onhere was so full of sexism. Try looking up “ambient belonging”: I remember some thing about all you had to do to get more women interested was change the decor to not suggest they were going to have to put up with sexist bullshit if they chose the field.
  - sisu2019 8y ago
    > without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly This is the life of all men in competence hierachies. All of these things happend to me within the last half year and have been since I was a boy. Doesn't matter in the least, you couldn't pry me away from my interests with a crowbar. This is your real problem: generally, girls want to be invited, boys just do. The reason I speak up at all and will take all the abuse and downvoting thats sure to follow is it irks me so much. We got into PCs and didn't matter one damn if they came from space aliens or out of the dumpster. We sat at them, we sat at them and we got scolded for it and told to go outside and called nerds. Our status was absolute dogshit and few women would associate willingly with computing in any form. I am old enough to remember that at parties we mumbled "something with computers" and smiled apologetically hoping the topic would move on. Yes, many of us spent years, decades even, feeling slightly ashamed of our profession. Now that the best and brightest of us nerds literally reshaped the world into a place where your personal handheld computer became a status symbol here come the women. And you know, it would be okay, we are very tame men overall, except now you claim your collective absence from this topic is because we hurt you. No, we did not, you all just didn't like computers.
- frostburg 8y ago
  Optimal application of talent. The concept of "choice" isn't very consistent, especially when applied to populations instead of individuals.
- koalala 8y ago
  To add to this, another important question to ask is: what kind of equality, in general, do you want? Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? They are mutually exclusive.
threeseed 8y ago
It's the same on Reddit. The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention. I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.
- vonseel 8y ago
  Dumb attitude. For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements. Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them. I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing something so large at this age. Being about the same age, I’m not jealous - but it is one more reminder that somewhere along the line my record-player skipped a few years. My 20s disappeared too quickly, or maybe I was focused on the wrong things (work) instead of passion.
  - charliepark 8y ago
    Agreed with you that her accomplishment is great. As in engineering, it's helpful to use proper terminology with people: if using a gender is necessary for the narrative … - under 13: girl - 13 – 18: girl / teenager / young woman (depends on context; 16? – 25?) - 18 or over: woman
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      it's important not to allow age-based vocab to drift when you are talking about a woman vs. a man, but I think it's more contextual than you present it. there are plenty of males over the age of eighteen whom I would not refer to as "men". if you changed only the gender of these people, I would probably not refer to them as "women" either.
    - bloopernova 8y ago
      Some additional anecdotal information on the above comment: My wife absolutely loathes being called "girl". It is used to reinforce the toxic idea that women are less mature and capable than men. Same feeling from other women that I've discussed this with. 18 or over = woman.
simias 8y ago
In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember. I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they (naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down so that we feel better about ourselves. I think most of us here on HN like to think that we're clever but when people like Katie Bouman get under the spotlight suddenly most of us realize that we're not such hot shots after all. It's probably worse when it's a woman/child/minority/... because it gives us the convenient excuse of "this is probably a PR stunt" to dismiss them. It's lazy and it's intellectually dishonest but it's also very human unfortunately.
- moomin 8y ago
  Indeed, one of the most poisonous things going on in Hollywood/TV right now is writers and actors getting told they didn't get the job because "diversity is hot right now" or some similar rubbish. It reinforces the idea that "the best" people should get the job (not the best people for the job) whilst simultaneously implying that "diverse" people are not "the best". This leads to people getting rejected thinking it's part of some culture war, when the truth is that most people get rejected, some of those people would have been brilliant in the role they got rejected for and it's exactly the same brutal industry that it was in the 1980s.
- njepa 8y ago
  I would hope that isn't it. While her trajectory might be uncommon it isn't abnormal. This is the kind of thing you are supposed to do with a PhD from MIT.
  - hurryskurry 8y ago
    But the amount of hours worked are probably insane. I wouldn't be surprised if she was in her lab 12 hours a day for her whole post-doc or something like that. Many people are intelligent enough, but are not going to work hard enough.
bubblewrap 8y ago
Can you point to some of those threads (men getting credit)?
- threeseed 8y ago
  Search for Elon Musk.
  - bubblewrap 8y ago
    You would say that's the same thing? Seeing as Elon Musk initiated all the things himself (and raised/provided the money)? I don't think he is getting credit for constructing rockets, for example, but for making the project happen. There was, however, an extra article about his rocket engineer on HN. Mabye that is more like it.
    - gnicholas 8y ago
      Fun fact: Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He became an investor and board member a year after the company was founded by two other people. His role grew and now he is synonymous with the company. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
  - conradfr 8y ago
    I guess we didn't the read the same threads about Elon Musk on HN.
warp_factor 8y ago
I think those comments try to react to the fact that this news got overblown because the researcher is a very talented woman. She definitely did something amazing and unfortunately it turned political because it fits the narrative that some people love to push currently. I'm not a fan of the liberal agenda of positive//negative discrimination. I really believe that it is making everyone worse off, especially women that are being treated like little kids that need to be shown the correct path.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Nobody is aiming to treat women like little kids. We just want to show that you if you accomplish something in tech you aren't going to be diminished or dismissed simply because you're a woman.
  - lr4444lr 8y ago
    Is there some blind spot people have when a woman is involved? Achievements by men are run through a gamut of informed and not-so-informed criticism all the time on HN. Bouman is getting standard treatment.
- roguecoder 8y ago
  I disagree with the premise that it is possible to overblow the news about a picture of a black hole. What kind of crappy nerd thinks science is getting too much press!?!!
nprateem 8y ago
> Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields How do you know?
- telesilla 8y ago
  One of the reasons I felt isolated in STEM 20 years ago was the very lack of role models. That's changing and I know for a fact, as I interact with young women, that seeing another woman in action as a professional in STEM helps them feel there is a place for them. It definitely fosters a sense of encouragement to pursue higher dreams.
  - bubblewrap 8y ago
    What prevents you from taking a man as a role model?
    - raphman 8y ago
      A 'role model' is someone who shares your background and is successful in an area of interest where you would like to participate/contribute (science, art, sports, politics, ...) . It's someone who demonstrates that 'someone like you' can be successful, too. Therefore, the closer this role model is to your inherent and unchangeable properties (age, sex/gender, origin, social class), the more it can inspire you. Surely, a man can be a role model for a woman in science (and vice versa) - e.g., if you are from the same small ethnic minority as the role model. However, male/female lifestyle, upbringing, interests, challenges, etc. are quite different in general, even in otherwise very homogeneous (western) societies. Therefore, the role model having the same sex/gender is very important. (Just my view - I don't have evidence or experience in this regard).
      - bubblewrap 8y ago
        I'd say that is just toxic feminism telling women they can't have men as role models. Why not? Would they say women can not achieve what men can (at least in science, if not in physical endeavors)? Because if they say women can do that, then why shouldn't they take men as role models? "Someone like you" - is for example a white man from a middle class background more like a white woman from a middle class background, or is that white women more like a black woman from a poor background? I think to say "biological sex" in that context is more defining for "likeness" in academia is a silly, toxic narrative. In my youth, I personally also enjoyed books and comics with female heroines, and never thought that they shouldn't be my role models. I guess these days that wouldn't be possible anymore.
0815test 8y ago
> There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and there is practically never any comments about this. For once a woman gets credit This is whataboutism at its best. The fact is that teams are all too often denied appropriate credit in the popular press for group projects, something which surely impacts many women working in science and STEM more generally. There's no reason why we should be expected to be happy about it this time around, merely because the one person who is getting all the attention happens to be female. I mean, you just need to look at that title: the computer scientist behind the picture? Isn't that ridiculous on its face?
mansoor_ 8y ago
I agree with your general sentiment but two comments: 1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the LHC or other astronomical projects. 2) The idea of focussing on a single team member is a technique for creating a clear narrative that readers can follow. The story would get less interest if you were told about the live and works of all of the team members. It's not all hate :)
- shaki-dora 8y ago
  Craig Venter
kakarot 8y ago
Hacker News isn't some monolithic community. Each time, you're seeing different people express their opinions. There's no hypocrisy there. I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much hard work. I see no reason to offer Bouman special treatment in this regard at the expense of others solely because of her gender. That isn't equality.
- soVeryTired 8y ago
  I don't really think she's getting special treatment because of her gender though. I think she's in the spotlight because: 1/ She led the team and was first author on the image reconstruction paper 2/ She gave a Ted talk on the topic a while back 3/ There's a brilliant photo of her initial reaction to the image that captures the excitement of scientific discovery circulating on the internet
  - kakarot 8y ago
    Thanks for mentioning the Ted talk, I'm about to check it out now. The first headline on Google for me when searching "black hole image" is this very BBC article. It was clearly written to grab the reader's attention, and it grabs it away from the actual phenomenon as well as all of the other brilliant minds who came together to make this happen. She led the CS team. But very-long-baseline interferometry has been around for half a century. Heino Falcke proposed the experiment. Shep Doeleman led the entire EHT initiative. Scientists around the world brought techniques to the table. I imagine even Bouman takes issue with being labeled "the scientist behind the first image of the black hole". She is surely aware and appreciative of the massive international effort involved.
    - roguecoder 8y ago
      Her existence is not a distraction from the science, and her being a her definitely isn’t. If it distracted you, that sounds like a you problem. You could try spend time reading about various women’s accomplishments until their gender is simply a fact rather than a “distraction”.
ralusek 8y ago
I'm copying my comment I made on reddit, but let me first preface by saying that I think that the accomplishments of Katie Bouman are entirely praiseworthy on their own merits. I don't mean to diminish the value of what she has done, I only mean to comment on what I believe you're arguing against. I think you're ignoring the other part of that pattern, which is that there is absolutely a propensity for posts of a given nature, i.e. "this is _the_ person who invented/achieved XYZ," featuring a woman or a disenfranchised minority figure, only for it to be specifically disingenuous and hyperbolic, and attempting to promote a truth on the basis of a different objective altogether. A good example were the multiple posts on the front page of reddit regarding Mary Beatrice Davidson inventing the sanitary pad (she didn't). Vice, among others, wrote about the same topic. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-davidson-kenner-sanitary-belt https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-... Similarly, the _only_ inventor of _any_ toy that I'm aware of is Lonnie Johnson, the black man who invented the super soaker and has been shared on Reddit countless times. Even Margaret Hamilton, as mentioned. I've seen her with her stack of code on Reddit at least 3x, and she's the only NASA engineer I'm even aware of. If you Google "American Inventors," not only is Thomas Edison the only white man in the first results, but the inventor of peanut butter and the super soaker displace Alexander Graham Bell and Nikola Tesla. I just googled it. https://i.imgur.com/Qu0PPiU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Qu0PPiU.jpg Mind you, this isn't to say that you'll find Margaret Hamilton mentioned more often than Albert Einstein. What is being discussed here is not objective quantities of exposure, but the distortion of ideological lens, and to what degree it is present. Where I think that you'd fundamentally disagree with my assessment is if I were to posit the question, "would this have had 5 different posts on the front page of reddit, specifically attributing the success of the project to a specific person, if that person had been a white or Asian male?" I think the kneejerk reaction might be "of course we would, having the achievements of white and Asian men is the default position of our society." But think about it. Would the American inventors in the google results have been there for their exact same accomplishments, if not for the color of their skin? Be honest. Would Mary Davidson have had multiple threads praising her if not for her gender and the color of her skin? Again, be honest. In this case of Katie Bouman, the unfortunate thing is that, again, this is a monumental achievement, and the majority of the praise is totally justifiable completely independent of any ideological lens. But the lens is also in effect, make no mistake, and that's what you are seeing a reaction to. This is the problem with identity politics. TL;DR you're almost certainly correct that the majority of the comments you see of that nature are on posts like this regarding women, but I think it's because posts of this nature are predominately about women and minorities, and often hyperbolic and patronizing.
scraft 8y ago
I am glad she got credit and I am glad in that respect she got treated equally. I am a little sad that her gender is a 'thing', as in I think I have seen more comments on various news site comments, social media, etc. that are quick to specifically point out she is a woman. I get they are trying to be positive, but it also has this weird reverse side where it is like "An amazing feat in STEM has been achieved, but you better brace yourself, it wasn't done by a man, it was done by a woman! A real living woman!". I understand the argument of needing to make a shout about it to help encourage more women into the field and to try to push against previous years of women not being in the limelight for work like this. But at the same point, every time it is specifically called out, it feels like something that is (obviously) only done for a woman, so therefore it is treating the achievement differently than if a man had achieved it. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Anyway, I do not want to sidetrack from this amazing achievement.
- aphextim 8y ago
  https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png
- ioulian 8y ago
  Yeah, the most important fact for the humanity that they did it, they created the first image of a black hole, is it a man, a woman, a child, a muslim, a white man, what does it even matter? I kinda hate the recent trend to focus more on gender or race if somebody achieves anything. Look what Morgan Freeman said about racism [0]. Is it really important that she is a woman? Do people think a lot of women can't achieve these things? And if 1 woman achieved this, all women are better than men? Do everybody just expect men to be smarter and if they do something outstanding it's ok, but when a woman does it, it's extraordinary... Why focus so much on this? In discussions like this we should really focus on the person (and also the team behind her/him, I doubt she could do it alone without the team), not the gender or race or whatever. I really hope this positive discrimination hype dies out, it doesn't help anybody. Let the best person for the job get the job. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
- gdepuydt 8y ago
hurryskurry 8y ago
In much of STEM women are basically at parity. With computer science, and engineering being obvious exceptions. Further there is a study which has shown that in countries with greater gender equality women choose STEM occupations less. Overall women get more graduate degrees than men and have been for the last ten years.
glangdale 8y ago
Yes, quite a number of big academic, scientific or industry figures have had stories about their achievements without any major reference to their (obviously necessary) team. No-one felt moved to point out there were contributions from the graduate students and staff that worked with Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio in the HN story about the latter three's Turing Award. I don't think I've ever seen so many people suddenly desperately concerned that the Little People get a mention, and I'm at least part-way convinced that gender (and maybe youth? she's 29...) has a good deal to do with it (apparently the other thing that triggers the "harrumph, what about the team" crowd are stories about child prodigies, according to another thread).
- roguecoder 8y ago
  “Women and children” is a phrase for a reason: men tend to treat both patronizingly, rather than identifying with them. Imagine you had just had your invention create a picture of a black hole, you wrote the paper where you were the first author describing this and then the press came knocking: would you be as gracious as she has been? Or would you feel like the fucking rockstar you would, in fact, be?
- throwAway572683 7y ago
  I think there is a misconception here. Dr. Bouman is a talented, enthusiastic and no doubt indispensable force on the larger team responsible for this achievement. Her role is as a co-lead for one small team which is responsible for one algorithm (out of four) used for imaging, as well as for an imagine verification algorithm (with Dr. Bouman's focus more on the latter). The larger imaging group (about 45 people by my rough count, led by Drs. Michael Johnson and Kazunori Akiyama) is itself one part of the analysis group, which has three other working groups, and then the analysis group is one of a half dozen larger groups in the EHT project which produced this result. So it's not a case of the project lead being presented as the face of the project, which is par for the course in academia (and the outside world). It is a postdoc one level above the grad students who form the least-senior rung of the project, and many levels from the top suddenly being misleadingly presented as the key figure in a major result. Imagine you worked on a small team of a couple of postdocs and a few grad students near the bottom of a hierarchy of teams involving hundreds of people, and then came in one day and your colleague and co-lead at the same level as you was suddenly presented as the face and key contributor for not only your small slice of things, not even the larger component to which the slice belongs, but the entire project? You'd probably be pretty happy for them, but also confused as to why the many people with the actual role as overall group leaders or the project leaders aren't mentioned. One might also note how distant the general public is from the machinations of the academic world that no one is asking how a 20-something CS postdoc ended up leading a multinational astronomy project involving top faculty from top institutions? In terms of notability and improbability, that would probably be a bigger story than any image produced by the group! Explaining her actual position and contribution is not in any way to detract from her contributions: only to clarify the record in the face of an onslaught of misleading media articles, which seemed to largely sourced (transitively) from a few misleading tweets, themselves triggered by a viral image. On top of that, none of this is doing Dr. Bouman any favors. Although they are mostly silent, no one in the EHT project is confused about her role, and none of the other people in her faculty or almost anyone else who matters will be under any misconception despite the headlines. If anything, academia is even more picky than other fields when it comes to attribution, so any type of misplaced credit can be viewed very negatively and can attach itself to a person indefinitely. Now she hasn't invited this or propagated this story, so one should consider her a blameless victim here: but not everyone in a position to care will necessarily remember that subtlety.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Yeah, this comment section is really bad. As someone who's been interested in astronomy my entire life, and considered getting a degree in it but only ended up with a minor since I sensibly prioritized CS and wanted to graduate in four years, this is an awesome, amazing, really clever accomplishment. And yet many of the comments here are just so negative, either outright sexist, picking nits and trying to argue that it isn't a big breakthrough or anything, or going through code contributions line-by-line trying to establish that really someone else had more to do with it. All I know is, she must be insanely intelligent and hard-working. What an awesome PhD project, and at MIT no less!, an institution that I have enormous respect for and that I somewhat identify with because my dad attended and I've been there for many events. I'm jealous. This would've been the exact kind of thing I'd have gone into in astronomy for (because of my background in programming) had I seriously pursued it, but I know I'm just not diligent enough to have seen it through. And being honest, I didn't apply myself well enough in undergrad to have gotten good enough grades to get into a good grad school. It sucks that so many people jump into "push people down" mode instead of "life people up" mode in these kinds of situations rather, because this is an amazing scientific accomplishment that deserves celebrating. One of the PIs in one of the press conferences said that this was the most important accomplishment in astronomy since 2014 [when Rosetta landed a probe on a comet], and I tend to agree. It's not just about this one image, but about establishing the feasibility of a virtual planet-sized radio telescope that is capable of imaging lots more than just black holes. A lot more discoveries are likely to come out of this technique, and guess who came up with the algorithm to make sense of all those petabytes of data?
cheekybillberry 8y ago
I think this might be one of those cases where we just have to agree to disagree, but I, well, disagree with the premise that the reaction to men is any different on this point. There are regularly posts here linking to articles about misattribution of credit in science and technology, the problem with the "great man theory," laments about the role of social media in creating hype, and there are plenty of male figures discussed here who engender bitter discussions about how credit should be assigned. I honestly don't see any difference between this discussion and any other discussion. I seem to remember similar discussions emerging about discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities, and many other physics discoveries involving large teams of researchers, just to take a few examples. The way credit is assigned in science is a significant moral crisis in my opinion (as it is in work in general; cf. rampant income inequality), and it really doesn't matter what the genders of the individuals involved are. Strangely enough, I think attention is being paid to this argument here because of her gender. It's one of these unfortunate circumstances where I think two competing ethical goals are kind of conflicting, one being the better representation of women and minorities in science, the other being lack of fair representation for all in credit.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Yeah, these arguments happen all the time, with plenty of male figures as well.
black-tea 8y ago
Really? You could easily find comments on here talking about how Steve Jobs wasn't really the genius at Apple, but rather it was Steve Wozniak. We do care who really did it. Always.
fzeroracer 8y ago
HN seems to have an unfortunate problem where any time women are promoted in tech it creates incredibly toxic threads with lots of thrashing and gnashing about how unfair it is. One needs to just look at another large thread that generated controversy to get an idea of the growing trend [1]. Which means one has to ask themselves: Is HN cultivating an environment that's only going to get worse? And personally, I think the answer would be yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269

dunslandsboo 8y ago

Why do you want to change the behaviour of women regarding their choice of study field?

juliendorra 8y ago
You misunderstood. We want any person, women and young girls included, to be able to pursue a career path, if they have even the faintest desire of it, without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly, or having to cope with various forms of harassment. If you build an environment that allow that, women presence in the field surge. And then you see retrospectively that many women wanted to try this field, but it was really the field that didn’t want women to try. Because, as you will probably agree, desire for a career is not natural destiny, it’s the result of many factors including avoiding being hurt.
- hurryskurry 8y ago
  In more equal societies women tend to choose STEM less though
- dunslandsboo 8y ago
  Maybe you can help me understand. So how do you explain why there are fewer women in STEM fields in Scandinavia and more in Turkey, Tunesia and United Arab Emirates? Well at least according to the paper "The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Gijsbert Stoet, David C. Geary" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719?journalCode=pssa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...
  - frostburg 8y ago
    Do you realize that women aren't a monolithic group? Various effects can be at play at the same time - women preferring on average other kinds of work isn't an argument in favour of discriminating against those that do not.
  - njepa 8y ago
    Scandinavia has hundreds of years of mostly unbroken history in STEM. It is literally the home of the Nobel prize. It isn't really comparable to nations that have rapidly shifted their workforce and industries more recently.
  - roguecoder 8y ago
    That is some just-so-story that doesn’t present a disprovable hypothesis. There was a better-supported causal hypothesis floating around that exposure to the internet, in particular, turned women off of CS because the culture #onhere was so full of sexism. Try looking up “ambient belonging”: I remember some thing about all you had to do to get more women interested was change the decor to not suggest they were going to have to put up with sexist bullshit if they chose the field.
- sisu2019 8y ago
  > without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly This is the life of all men in competence hierachies. All of these things happend to me within the last half year and have been since I was a boy. Doesn't matter in the least, you couldn't pry me away from my interests with a crowbar. This is your real problem: generally, girls want to be invited, boys just do. The reason I speak up at all and will take all the abuse and downvoting thats sure to follow is it irks me so much. We got into PCs and didn't matter one damn if they came from space aliens or out of the dumpster. We sat at them, we sat at them and we got scolded for it and told to go outside and called nerds. Our status was absolute dogshit and few women would associate willingly with computing in any form. I am old enough to remember that at parties we mumbled "something with computers" and smiled apologetically hoping the topic would move on. Yes, many of us spent years, decades even, feeling slightly ashamed of our profession. Now that the best and brightest of us nerds literally reshaped the world into a place where your personal handheld computer became a status symbol here come the women. And you know, it would be okay, we are very tame men overall, except now you claim your collective absence from this topic is because we hurt you. No, we did not, you all just didn't like computers.
frostburg 8y ago
Optimal application of talent. The concept of "choice" isn't very consistent, especially when applied to populations instead of individuals.
koalala 8y ago
To add to this, another important question to ask is: what kind of equality, in general, do you want? Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? They are mutually exclusive.

threeseed 8y ago

It's the same on Reddit. The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention. I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.

vonseel 8y ago
Dumb attitude. For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements. Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them. I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing something so large at this age. Being about the same age, I’m not jealous - but it is one more reminder that somewhere along the line my record-player skipped a few years. My 20s disappeared too quickly, or maybe I was focused on the wrong things (work) instead of passion.
- charliepark 8y ago
  Agreed with you that her accomplishment is great. As in engineering, it's helpful to use proper terminology with people: if using a gender is necessary for the narrative … - under 13: girl - 13 – 18: girl / teenager / young woman (depends on context; 16? – 25?) - 18 or over: woman
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    it's important not to allow age-based vocab to drift when you are talking about a woman vs. a man, but I think it's more contextual than you present it. there are plenty of males over the age of eighteen whom I would not refer to as "men". if you changed only the gender of these people, I would probably not refer to them as "women" either.
  - bloopernova 8y ago
    Some additional anecdotal information on the above comment: My wife absolutely loathes being called "girl". It is used to reinforce the toxic idea that women are less mature and capable than men. Same feeling from other women that I've discussed this with. 18 or over = woman.

simias 8y ago

In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember. I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they (naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down so that we feel better about ourselves. I think most of us here on HN like to think that we're clever but when people like Katie Bouman get under the spotlight suddenly most of us realize that we're not such hot shots after all. It's probably worse when it's a woman/child/minority/... because it gives us the convenient excuse of "this is probably a PR stunt" to dismiss them. It's lazy and it's intellectually dishonest but it's also very human unfortunately.

moomin 8y ago
Indeed, one of the most poisonous things going on in Hollywood/TV right now is writers and actors getting told they didn't get the job because "diversity is hot right now" or some similar rubbish. It reinforces the idea that "the best" people should get the job (not the best people for the job) whilst simultaneously implying that "diverse" people are not "the best". This leads to people getting rejected thinking it's part of some culture war, when the truth is that most people get rejected, some of those people would have been brilliant in the role they got rejected for and it's exactly the same brutal industry that it was in the 1980s.
njepa 8y ago
I would hope that isn't it. While her trajectory might be uncommon it isn't abnormal. This is the kind of thing you are supposed to do with a PhD from MIT.
- hurryskurry 8y ago
  But the amount of hours worked are probably insane. I wouldn't be surprised if she was in her lab 12 hours a day for her whole post-doc or something like that. Many people are intelligent enough, but are not going to work hard enough.

bubblewrap 8y ago

Can you point to some of those threads (men getting credit)?

threeseed 8y ago
Search for Elon Musk.
- bubblewrap 8y ago
  You would say that's the same thing? Seeing as Elon Musk initiated all the things himself (and raised/provided the money)? I don't think he is getting credit for constructing rockets, for example, but for making the project happen. There was, however, an extra article about his rocket engineer on HN. Mabye that is more like it.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    Fun fact: Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He became an investor and board member a year after the company was founded by two other people. His role grew and now he is synonymous with the company. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
- conradfr 8y ago
  I guess we didn't the read the same threads about Elon Musk on HN.

warp_factor 8y ago

I think those comments try to react to the fact that this news got overblown because the researcher is a very talented woman. She definitely did something amazing and unfortunately it turned political because it fits the narrative that some people love to push currently. I'm not a fan of the liberal agenda of positive//negative discrimination. I really believe that it is making everyone worse off, especially women that are being treated like little kids that need to be shown the correct path.

threeseed 8y ago
Nobody is aiming to treat women like little kids. We just want to show that you if you accomplish something in tech you aren't going to be diminished or dismissed simply because you're a woman.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  Is there some blind spot people have when a woman is involved? Achievements by men are run through a gamut of informed and not-so-informed criticism all the time on HN. Bouman is getting standard treatment.
roguecoder 8y ago
I disagree with the premise that it is possible to overblow the news about a picture of a black hole. What kind of crappy nerd thinks science is getting too much press!?!!

nprateem 8y ago

> Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields How do you know?

telesilla 8y ago
One of the reasons I felt isolated in STEM 20 years ago was the very lack of role models. That's changing and I know for a fact, as I interact with young women, that seeing another woman in action as a professional in STEM helps them feel there is a place for them. It definitely fosters a sense of encouragement to pursue higher dreams.
- bubblewrap 8y ago
  What prevents you from taking a man as a role model?
  - raphman 8y ago
    A 'role model' is someone who shares your background and is successful in an area of interest where you would like to participate/contribute (science, art, sports, politics, ...) . It's someone who demonstrates that 'someone like you' can be successful, too. Therefore, the closer this role model is to your inherent and unchangeable properties (age, sex/gender, origin, social class), the more it can inspire you. Surely, a man can be a role model for a woman in science (and vice versa) - e.g., if you are from the same small ethnic minority as the role model. However, male/female lifestyle, upbringing, interests, challenges, etc. are quite different in general, even in otherwise very homogeneous (western) societies. Therefore, the role model having the same sex/gender is very important. (Just my view - I don't have evidence or experience in this regard).
    - bubblewrap 8y ago
      I'd say that is just toxic feminism telling women they can't have men as role models. Why not? Would they say women can not achieve what men can (at least in science, if not in physical endeavors)? Because if they say women can do that, then why shouldn't they take men as role models? "Someone like you" - is for example a white man from a middle class background more like a white woman from a middle class background, or is that white women more like a black woman from a poor background? I think to say "biological sex" in that context is more defining for "likeness" in academia is a silly, toxic narrative. In my youth, I personally also enjoyed books and comics with female heroines, and never thought that they shouldn't be my role models. I guess these days that wouldn't be possible anymore.

0815test 8y ago

> There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and there is practically never any comments about this. For once a woman gets credit This is whataboutism at its best. The fact is that teams are all too often denied appropriate credit in the popular press for group projects, something which surely impacts many women working in science and STEM more generally. There's no reason why we should be expected to be happy about it this time around, merely because the one person who is getting all the attention happens to be female. I mean, you just need to look at that title: the computer scientist behind the picture? Isn't that ridiculous on its face?

mansoor_ 8y ago

I agree with your general sentiment but two comments: 1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the LHC or other astronomical projects. 2) The idea of focussing on a single team member is a technique for creating a clear narrative that readers can follow. The story would get less interest if you were told about the live and works of all of the team members. It's not all hate :)

shaki-dora 8y ago
Craig Venter

kakarot 8y ago

Hacker News isn't some monolithic community. Each time, you're seeing different people express their opinions. There's no hypocrisy there. I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much hard work. I see no reason to offer Bouman special treatment in this regard at the expense of others solely because of her gender. That isn't equality.

soVeryTired 8y ago
I don't really think she's getting special treatment because of her gender though. I think she's in the spotlight because: 1/ She led the team and was first author on the image reconstruction paper 2/ She gave a Ted talk on the topic a while back 3/ There's a brilliant photo of her initial reaction to the image that captures the excitement of scientific discovery circulating on the internet
- kakarot 8y ago
  Thanks for mentioning the Ted talk, I'm about to check it out now. The first headline on Google for me when searching "black hole image" is this very BBC article. It was clearly written to grab the reader's attention, and it grabs it away from the actual phenomenon as well as all of the other brilliant minds who came together to make this happen. She led the CS team. But very-long-baseline interferometry has been around for half a century. Heino Falcke proposed the experiment. Shep Doeleman led the entire EHT initiative. Scientists around the world brought techniques to the table. I imagine even Bouman takes issue with being labeled "the scientist behind the first image of the black hole". She is surely aware and appreciative of the massive international effort involved.
  - roguecoder 8y ago
    Her existence is not a distraction from the science, and her being a her definitely isn’t. If it distracted you, that sounds like a you problem. You could try spend time reading about various women’s accomplishments until their gender is simply a fact rather than a “distraction”.

ralusek 8y ago

I'm copying my comment I made on reddit, but let me first preface by saying that I think that the accomplishments of Katie Bouman are entirely praiseworthy on their own merits. I don't mean to diminish the value of what she has done, I only mean to comment on what I believe you're arguing against. I think you're ignoring the other part of that pattern, which is that there is absolutely a propensity for posts of a given nature, i.e. "this is _the_ person who invented/achieved XYZ," featuring a woman or a disenfranchised minority figure, only for it to be specifically disingenuous and hyperbolic, and attempting to promote a truth on the basis of a different objective altogether. A good example were the multiple posts on the front page of reddit regarding Mary Beatrice Davidson inventing the sanitary pad (she didn't). Vice, among others, wrote about the same topic. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-davidson-kenner-sanitary-belt https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-... Similarly, the _only_ inventor of _any_ toy that I'm aware of is Lonnie Johnson, the black man who invented the super soaker and has been shared on Reddit countless times. Even Margaret Hamilton, as mentioned. I've seen her with her stack of code on Reddit at least 3x, and she's the only NASA engineer I'm even aware of. If you Google "American Inventors," not only is Thomas Edison the only white man in the first results, but the inventor of peanut butter and the super soaker displace Alexander Graham Bell and Nikola Tesla. I just googled it. https://i.imgur.com/Qu0PPiU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Qu0PPiU.jpg Mind you, this isn't to say that you'll find Margaret Hamilton mentioned more often than Albert Einstein. What is being discussed here is not objective quantities of exposure, but the distortion of ideological lens, and to what degree it is present. Where I think that you'd fundamentally disagree with my assessment is if I were to posit the question, "would this have had 5 different posts on the front page of reddit, specifically attributing the success of the project to a specific person, if that person had been a white or Asian male?" I think the kneejerk reaction might be "of course we would, having the achievements of white and Asian men is the default position of our society." But think about it. Would the American inventors in the google results have been there for their exact same accomplishments, if not for the color of their skin? Be honest. Would Mary Davidson have had multiple threads praising her if not for her gender and the color of her skin? Again, be honest. In this case of Katie Bouman, the unfortunate thing is that, again, this is a monumental achievement, and the majority of the praise is totally justifiable completely independent of any ideological lens. But the lens is also in effect, make no mistake, and that's what you are seeing a reaction to. This is the problem with identity politics. TL;DR you're almost certainly correct that the majority of the comments you see of that nature are on posts like this regarding women, but I think it's because posts of this nature are predominately about women and minorities, and often hyperbolic and patronizing.

scraft 8y ago

I am glad she got credit and I am glad in that respect she got treated equally. I am a little sad that her gender is a 'thing', as in I think I have seen more comments on various news site comments, social media, etc. that are quick to specifically point out she is a woman. I get they are trying to be positive, but it also has this weird reverse side where it is like "An amazing feat in STEM has been achieved, but you better brace yourself, it wasn't done by a man, it was done by a woman! A real living woman!". I understand the argument of needing to make a shout about it to help encourage more women into the field and to try to push against previous years of women not being in the limelight for work like this. But at the same point, every time it is specifically called out, it feels like something that is (obviously) only done for a woman, so therefore it is treating the achievement differently than if a man had achieved it. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Anyway, I do not want to sidetrack from this amazing achievement.

aphextim 8y ago
https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png
ioulian 8y ago
Yeah, the most important fact for the humanity that they did it, they created the first image of a black hole, is it a man, a woman, a child, a muslim, a white man, what does it even matter? I kinda hate the recent trend to focus more on gender or race if somebody achieves anything. Look what Morgan Freeman said about racism [0]. Is it really important that she is a woman? Do people think a lot of women can't achieve these things? And if 1 woman achieved this, all women are better than men? Do everybody just expect men to be smarter and if they do something outstanding it's ok, but when a woman does it, it's extraordinary... Why focus so much on this? In discussions like this we should really focus on the person (and also the team behind her/him, I doubt she could do it alone without the team), not the gender or race or whatever. I really hope this positive discrimination hype dies out, it doesn't help anybody. Let the best person for the job get the job. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
gdepuydt 8y ago

hurryskurry 8y ago

In much of STEM women are basically at parity. With computer science, and engineering being obvious exceptions. Further there is a study which has shown that in countries with greater gender equality women choose STEM occupations less. Overall women get more graduate degrees than men and have been for the last ten years.

glangdale 8y ago

Yes, quite a number of big academic, scientific or industry figures have had stories about their achievements without any major reference to their (obviously necessary) team. No-one felt moved to point out there were contributions from the graduate students and staff that worked with Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio in the HN story about the latter three's Turing Award. I don't think I've ever seen so many people suddenly desperately concerned that the Little People get a mention, and I'm at least part-way convinced that gender (and maybe youth? she's 29...) has a good deal to do with it (apparently the other thing that triggers the "harrumph, what about the team" crowd are stories about child prodigies, according to another thread).

roguecoder 8y ago
“Women and children” is a phrase for a reason: men tend to treat both patronizingly, rather than identifying with them. Imagine you had just had your invention create a picture of a black hole, you wrote the paper where you were the first author describing this and then the press came knocking: would you be as gracious as she has been? Or would you feel like the fucking rockstar you would, in fact, be?
throwAway572683 7y ago
I think there is a misconception here. Dr. Bouman is a talented, enthusiastic and no doubt indispensable force on the larger team responsible for this achievement. Her role is as a co-lead for one small team which is responsible for one algorithm (out of four) used for imaging, as well as for an imagine verification algorithm (with Dr. Bouman's focus more on the latter). The larger imaging group (about 45 people by my rough count, led by Drs. Michael Johnson and Kazunori Akiyama) is itself one part of the analysis group, which has three other working groups, and then the analysis group is one of a half dozen larger groups in the EHT project which produced this result. So it's not a case of the project lead being presented as the face of the project, which is par for the course in academia (and the outside world). It is a postdoc one level above the grad students who form the least-senior rung of the project, and many levels from the top suddenly being misleadingly presented as the key figure in a major result. Imagine you worked on a small team of a couple of postdocs and a few grad students near the bottom of a hierarchy of teams involving hundreds of people, and then came in one day and your colleague and co-lead at the same level as you was suddenly presented as the face and key contributor for not only your small slice of things, not even the larger component to which the slice belongs, but the entire project? You'd probably be pretty happy for them, but also confused as to why the many people with the actual role as overall group leaders or the project leaders aren't mentioned. One might also note how distant the general public is from the machinations of the academic world that no one is asking how a 20-something CS postdoc ended up leading a multinational astronomy project involving top faculty from top institutions? In terms of notability and improbability, that would probably be a bigger story than any image produced by the group! Explaining her actual position and contribution is not in any way to detract from her contributions: only to clarify the record in the face of an onslaught of misleading media articles, which seemed to largely sourced (transitively) from a few misleading tweets, themselves triggered by a viral image. On top of that, none of this is doing Dr. Bouman any favors. Although they are mostly silent, no one in the EHT project is confused about her role, and none of the other people in her faculty or almost anyone else who matters will be under any misconception despite the headlines. If anything, academia is even more picky than other fields when it comes to attribution, so any type of misplaced credit can be viewed very negatively and can attach itself to a person indefinitely. Now she hasn't invited this or propagated this story, so one should consider her a blameless victim here: but not everyone in a position to care will necessarily remember that subtlety.

CydeWeys 8y ago

Yeah, this comment section is really bad. As someone who's been interested in astronomy my entire life, and considered getting a degree in it but only ended up with a minor since I sensibly prioritized CS and wanted to graduate in four years, this is an awesome, amazing, really clever accomplishment. And yet many of the comments here are just so negative, either outright sexist, picking nits and trying to argue that it isn't a big breakthrough or anything, or going through code contributions line-by-line trying to establish that really someone else had more to do with it. All I know is, she must be insanely intelligent and hard-working. What an awesome PhD project, and at MIT no less!, an institution that I have enormous respect for and that I somewhat identify with because my dad attended and I've been there for many events. I'm jealous. This would've been the exact kind of thing I'd have gone into in astronomy for (because of my background in programming) had I seriously pursued it, but I know I'm just not diligent enough to have seen it through. And being honest, I didn't apply myself well enough in undergrad to have gotten good enough grades to get into a good grad school. It sucks that so many people jump into "push people down" mode instead of "life people up" mode in these kinds of situations rather, because this is an amazing scientific accomplishment that deserves celebrating. One of the PIs in one of the press conferences said that this was the most important accomplishment in astronomy since 2014 [when Rosetta landed a probe on a comet], and I tend to agree. It's not just about this one image, but about establishing the feasibility of a virtual planet-sized radio telescope that is capable of imaging lots more than just black holes. A lot more discoveries are likely to come out of this technique, and guess who came up with the algorithm to make sense of all those petabytes of data?

cheekybillberry 8y ago

I think this might be one of those cases where we just have to agree to disagree, but I, well, disagree with the premise that the reaction to men is any different on this point. There are regularly posts here linking to articles about misattribution of credit in science and technology, the problem with the "great man theory," laments about the role of social media in creating hype, and there are plenty of male figures discussed here who engender bitter discussions about how credit should be assigned. I honestly don't see any difference between this discussion and any other discussion. I seem to remember similar discussions emerging about discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities, and many other physics discoveries involving large teams of researchers, just to take a few examples. The way credit is assigned in science is a significant moral crisis in my opinion (as it is in work in general; cf. rampant income inequality), and it really doesn't matter what the genders of the individuals involved are. Strangely enough, I think attention is being paid to this argument here because of her gender. It's one of these unfortunate circumstances where I think two competing ethical goals are kind of conflicting, one being the better representation of women and minorities in science, the other being lack of fair representation for all in credit.

ummonk 8y ago
Yeah, these arguments happen all the time, with plenty of male figures as well.

black-tea 8y ago

Really? You could easily find comments on here talking about how Steve Jobs wasn't really the genius at Apple, but rather it was Steve Wozniak. We do care who really did it. Always.

fzeroracer 8y ago

HN seems to have an unfortunate problem where any time women are promoted in tech it creates incredibly toxic threads with lots of thrashing and gnashing about how unfair it is. One needs to just look at another large thread that generated controversy to get an idea of the growing trend [1]. Which means one has to ask themselves: Is HN cultivating an environment that's only going to get worse? And personally, I think the answer would be yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269