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Comment by mises | Hacker News Reader

Honestly curious: why did Bouman get the credit she did? According to Github, she didn't commit nearly as much code, 2.5k LOC vs 850k lines. I understand she migut have had a greater role in management etc.; my point is more that it was a team effort (which she reiterated). Is this a case of the media trying to "celebrate diversity" by unfairly cutting out the whole team which accomplished something incredible? Or is she just the public face and responsible for their media presence?

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Please don't drag us down into previous hells.

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

She is credited because she did the work.

It's telling that when it's a woman getting the credit you're hanging on about teams, but when it's a man getting credit you say nothing.

https://mobile.twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/11165185449...

Because that's how the world works, project leaders get fame and line workers don't.

Somehow people are OK when Elon Musk gets credit for Tesla and SpaceX, Steve Jobs for the iPhone but suddenly if it's a women people will dig the github accounts.

I don't think the Elon Musk or Steve Jobs analogy is accurate. Katie Bouman was co-leader of one of four imaging teams on the project. It seems to me the other person who co-led that team deserves equal praise and fame, and perhaps also the leaders of the other 3 teams.

Having said that, the look of excitement and joy on Dr Bouman's face in that photo is so lovely and relatable that the pic was always destined to go viral. So in that sense you could say she was bound to become the human face of the project.

Really nobody thinks Steve Jobs build the IPhone all alone in a work shop.

> Is this a case of the media trying to "celebrate diversity"

There are several similar releases every year. Finding the Higgs boson. Landing the Rosetta stone lander on a comet. Launching a new kid of a rocket.

Were you questioning people doing these releases the same way? Why not? Is it maybe because they were of the expected gender?

Before accusing people of biases it's best to examine yourself.

My guess is because the people who found the Higgs boson, landed the lander on the comet, etc. are for all intents and purposes not well known: there wasn't a lot of fanfare for them so much as the discovery. As such, people are oddly upset about her getting praise for this.

I look at it two ways: one, what she did was not insignificant. Whether she received more praise than someone discovering something else that happened to be a guy, not a concern that is going to cause me to lose sleep at night nor is it something she should be punished for. Two, if her story getting bubbled up inspires girls (or anyone, I suppose) to get involved in or at least more interested in the sciences, hell, I'd say we're all better for it.

I mean, even if you believe that all gender (and minority in general) issues have been solved in the sciences, as of [pick arbitrary date between 1980 and 2019], and there is no longer any dismissal, harassment, or discouragement of women pursuing a career in the sciences, I think we as a society can handle another forty, fifty years of rubbing every "see? Women can too do science as well as the menfolk" achievement in the metaphorical face of the centuries of dismissing women as by-and-large sub-intelligent creatures not temperamentally suited to any serious intellectual work.

Even if it is completely unnecessary nowadays, because women are no longer dismissed, individually or collectively, as not contributing to science, because women are no longer harassed, sexually or misogynistically, when they try to pursue a career in science, I still think it's fair to let people glory for awhile longer in achieving what people once thought they wouldn't, even if most of the disbelievers are centuries dead and hardly any of them are still alive and posting on the internet.

This might be the best comment I’ve ever seen on HN

I recently had a percussionist in a band I was in assert that "women don't have the brains to be mechanical engineers", and he honestly seemed to be serious. These people still exist

edit: I realise the post I'm responding to is sarcastic, but not everyone who thinks women are intellectually inferior to men is a troll

I don't disagree with anything you said here.

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