Brian Resnick* says male scientists are often cast as lone geniuses, but social media went into meltdown when a woman was given the same treatment.
Just after the Event Horizon Telescope project announced earlier this month that its astronomers had managed to capture the first-ever image of a black hole, MIT tweeted an image of Katie Bouman (pictured).
Bouman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University who helped develop the code to find the black hole needle in the haystack of data collected from the effort.
This photo shows the first time she saw the results of that work, with the black hole image on her computer screen.
This is a photo of a pure “eureka!” moment.
It’s delightful, an inspiration.
It quickly went viral, and news outlets began hailing Bouman as the “face of the black hole project.”
But then all the attention became a catalyst for a sexist backlash on social media.
It set off “what can only be described as a sexist scavenger hunt,” as The Verge described it, in which an apparently small group of vociferous men questioned Bouman’s role in the project.
“People began going over her work to see how much she’d really contributed to the project that skyrocketed her to unasked-for fame,” The Verge wrote.
There’s a lot of nonsense tied up in this episode — and we wouldn’t even be talking about it if platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube didn’t allow trollish thinking to fester and spread virally.
But there are a few key takeaways.
One is that while the “lone genius” narrative can be tantalising, it’s almost never true, especially in science.
Another is that women often don’t feel welcome in scientific fields — and the reaction to Bouman’s picture reveals hostility many women scientists face all the time.
Lastly, to combat this hostility, we need to see more images of women thriving in science.
In telling stories about science, there’s a bias in our culture to focus on the lone genius.
It’s how the history of science is often told: The world exists one way, and then people such as Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, come along and shake up our fundamental understanding of things.
Sure, sometimes the “lone genius” trope is warranted.
But especially in present times, science is hardly ever a solitary endeavour.
The biggest recent discoveries in physics involve a huge number of people working over the span of decades.
Once the MIT image of Bouman started to go viral, she was suddenly the lone genius behind the Event Horizon Telescope’s groundbreaking discovery.
There were many, many tweets riffing on the assumption that Bouman was the driving force behind the discovery.
Bouman and her colleagues clarified, in no uncertain terms, that the black hole image was a team effort.
In all, more than 200 scientists worked on it — from all over the world.
“No one algorithm or person made this image,” Bouman wrote on Facebook.
“It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.”
Right-wing trolls feel threatened by women in power
The “lone genius” trope is usually unfairly bestowed upon men.
Throughout history, women’s roles in major scientific discoveries have been unfairly downplayed or overlooked.
The possibility that Bouman might have been a major player in the black hole discovery seemed to have deeply upset right-wing trolls, perhaps because they feel their status is threatened by women like her.
“It’s about what they perceive as a growing cultural/ideological battle that seeks to unjustly advance the station of women and minorities at their expense,” Nour Kteily, a social scientist wrote in an email.
The elevation of women possibly makes them feel less secure in their status as men in society.
“From their perspective, the elevation of Bouman represents little more than an example of an undeserving member of a group … given advantages she hasn’t earned,” Kteily says.
Bouman’s picture may have been overhyped but it’s still important.
We see so few images of triumphant women in science.
“When you think about what a scientist means, you probably think of an Einstein figure — a man in a lab or at a chalkboard with fuzzy, unkempt hair,” my colleague Julia Belluz once wrote.
“When you think of a scientist’s voice, you might conjure Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan.”
“The association is reinforced in primary school science textbooks, where images of men outnumber images of women by three to one,” Belluz wrote.
When Canadian physicist Donna Strickland won the 2018 Nobel Prize, there wasn’t even a Wikipedia article published about her.
A previous entry on her had been removed because she was deemed not significant enough.
There are so many ways women and minority scientists have been erased from history or not written into it.
Images of women in science matter because far too many women aren’t encouraged, or don’t feel welcome, to pursue careers in science.
To this day, many women feel hostility when climbing the career ladder in science.
When you look at the right-wing reaction to Bouman’s story — as exaggerated as some tweets about her might have been — it’s no wonder why some feel this hostility.
There are still too many people who don’t want to see a woman in science succeed.
* Brian Resnick is science reporter for Vox. He tweets at @B_resnick and his website is brian-resnick.com.
This article first appeared at www.vox.com.
