Female Black Hole Physicist Being Trolled...for Being a Female Physicist

Picture credit: The EHT Collaboration and https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/04/harvard-scientists-lead-team-revealing-black-hole/

A few days ago (accurate at the time of writing) the first picture of a black hole was created. This image was the hard work of a group of scientists in America. One of these scientists was Post-doc Katie Bouman.

It has been said by many members of the imaging group that Katie was crucial in developing one of the algorithms that allowed the picture to be taken and was also involved in all the collaborative efforts going into the other algorithms. Of course she wasn't single handedly responsible for the results, and no one has claimed that, one scientist alone is very rarely responsible for a break through these days. It's down to collaborations and assistance from a wide variety of experts. As Katie was a key member of the team and wrote a large amount of the code it seems fair to praise her and her input, particularly as she is a young woman in a highly male dominated field.

It would seem that many of the people trolling her on Twitter and Reddit, saying that her colleague Andrew Chael wrote " 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!” are doing so based on her gender. Even Andrew himself has come to her defence saying that is not true, that it was a collaborative effort, of which she was a key member. This is not to downplay his role, or that of any other of the 200 scientists involved in the project, but it would seem that some people are not happy with a young woman getting any credit for work in physics, a stereotypical 'man subject', and that it must have been a man doing all the hard work. This also implies that the woman just taking credit to make the field look progressive when, in fact, it is the credit she deserves. It seems sad that in 2019 it is still perceived that women can not or should not excel in a 'man's field' and vice versa.

Thankfully Katie isn't letting this negativity get to her and is due to start as an Assistant Professor this Autumn.

For more information on this story and the imaging of the black hole, I've put a few links below:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/12/trolls-hijacked-scientists-image-attack-katie-bouman-they-picked-wrong-astrophysicist/?utm_term=.9d644a6350cd

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hole-algorithm-sci-trnd/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/14/the-new-black-hole-what-can-we-really-see