Misogyny is its own excuse, obviously, but I think part of the problem is science has become too complex to distill into tidy bites for morning morons. "Here's a picture of a black hole" is truthier than "here's a composite image generated through heavy number-crunching and a groundbreaking data survey and analysis mission to categorize a HRRNNNNNNNNNNNSQUIRREL!" and "here's a cute picture of an excited girl" is truthier than "here's one of countless hundreds of eager, hard-working professionals whose years of labor culminated today in something I have no real handle on I have a BA in broadcasting." So you've got people who kind of get it attempting to explain it to people who don't get it and if you know a little more about black holes than the talking heads on CNN you're resentful. And if their bullshit narrative runs contrary to your bullshit narrative, Fire up the hate machine Clarence! The article is right in that the core problem is our whole model of "science" is outdated. Considering how we value education, however, "outdated" is gonna be tough to refit.
One of the reasons why she was dismissed was because the number of lines of code she committed to Github was only a small fraction of a male team member's lines of code committed. Regardless of the fact that the worth of a code library and number of lines are only somewhat correlated, it's still an incredibly stupid argument, and it reminds me of this snippet that a musician shared with me way back in the day: My understanding is that she wrote a lot of the crucial algorithms that stitched the data together into a final composite image (plzdon'tsaypicture x3). That she did science using a code library someone else authored is no surprise to anyone doing science. It's how most scientists operate day in and day out. I know some brilliant women in my little field, but I don't know of a single black person. It bothers me. And I've met exactly one black female physicist in all my days. But judging by the demographics of some of the classes I TA'd a few years ago, that shouldn't last too long :).I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
The YouTube video I stole the title from compared it to Chuck Yeager getting credit for breaking the sound barrier and John Glen going to space even though those dudes didn’t do any of the work that led to those achievements. Not the most perfect analogy but the internet manosphere isn't standing up for the recognition of those nameless engineers
I think it was an iteration of Citrix Server - don't quote me on that - that was basically Windows Server with 120-something lines of code edited. Yeah - Windows Server is a beast. But the value-per-line proposition there was pretty great for Citrix (if that's who it was). I'll be honest. I read this in the original article: ...and thought "how in hell did they find 40 women of color working in astronomy?" The actual study is nearly as bad as my misread: Of 421 astronomers surveyed, they found 66 that weren't 100% white and even oversampling for women, they found 44 who weren't white.I know some brilliant women in my little field, but I don't know of a single black person.
A 2015 survey found 40 percent of women of color working in astronomy “reported that they had felt unsafe in their current career position due to gender” in a survey.
I've had a conversation where a woman scientist implored me to never forget the struggle of women in science, or even more rarely, a hispanic (male) scientist (even in my neck of the woods!). And she's absolutely right on both accounts. Extrapolating the rarity of brown to black makes for even more appalling statistics, in line with my own experiences. UGH