Katie Bouman - Black hole image and backlash already

[BixBeiderbecke]

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/katie-bouman-black-hole-image-first-telescope-a8866536.html

Because a picture of her with the picture of the black hole has gone viral, I think some have believed it was entirely down to her — even though she never said that and others saw that and thought WHAT ABOUT THE MEN. They are not getting the credit here and that must be rectified. A great quote in the article from a male member of the team who wrote a lot of the code I think.

What's good is that she has clearly got a fantastic relationship with her team and they are all supporting each other.

It’s sad that teamwork between men and women is not recognised and those with an agenda serve to distract from important scientific works.

It's not a surprise. All the comments about this have emphasized the collaborative nature of the work. Anyone whinging about the involvement of a woman is just displaying their misogyny.

Love the comments from her colleague.

Yes definitely Emperor.

Agree Palaminoo. I feel the press have had a role here too - maybe headlines should say “KB and her team”. It’s a great story of teamwork.

I love the smell of whataboutery in the morning.

When you think about how invisible women tend to be in academia too fuckers.

Some men out there would really like us all dead or just back in our silent kitchens wouldn't they?

Yes, they hate it when it goes even a tiny bit the other way. Zero tolerance.

Not that it did go the other way - that's just a misogynistic perception of people who need to see a man feted for every achievement everywhere.

Bet they're happy with what happened to Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Prof Bell Burnell's story has been both an inspiration and motivation for many female scientists. As a research student when pulsars were discovered, she was not included in the Nobel prize citation - despite having been the first to observe and analyse the astronomical objects (a type of neutron star that emits a beam of radiation).

She led the project. The project leader tends to get more credit (or blame) than individual team members because they are coordinating and planning. In this case she's been keen to point out everyone's contribution - hasn't stopped the MRAs shrieking though.

Female scientist here.

The backlash is repugnant, however the initial viral reporting was inaccurate and unfair to the many scientists (male and female) who made equally significant contributions to the project.

Dr. Katie Bouman didn't lead the project. She was co-leader of one of the 4 teams who carried out the imaging part of the project. These twitter threads clarify contributions, and also what started the viral reporting:

twitter.com/sparse_k/status/1116785802367918080 by Kazu Akiyama, one of the Imaging Working Group coordinators.

twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/1116518544961830918 by Andrew Chael, who co-lead one of the Imaging teams with Katie Bouman.

I'd also suggest looking at the Event Horizon Telescope Organization web-page to get a feeling for how big science collaborations are structured. There are 2 senior women on the Science Council (Sera Markoff and Feryal Ozel), various female Working Group Coordinators and lots of female PhD students and postdocs actually carrying out the instrumentation, data collection, processing and analysis (who aren't listed on this page since it's a ~200 person collaboration).

The backlash was pretty harsh, but Katie Bouman has only been on the project for three years and it has been going on for ten years, so it was a bit unfortunate that BBC, among others, presented the findings as if she was the primary contributor.