About 5 years ago, I blogged about NPR's coverage of a couple, Brian and Elizabeth, who developed an app for detecting a type of eye cancer. They were both chemists, and Elizabeth had noticed white-eye in pictures of their baby and remembered that she'd read it could be a sign of cancer. Brian initially downplayed her concerns, but the baby was diagnosed with eye cancer on his next visit to the pediatrician. A few years after the baby was diagnosed with cancer, Brian went back to look at the pictures and see when the white eye started to show up. Anyway, in the interview they made it clear that it was a team effort, but the interviewer really pushed the 'genius science guy discovers something' narrative.
NPR had another story on the app today. I clicked on it to see if they'd gotten more inclusive this time. Nope. This time around, there was no mention of Elizabeth's role at all, either by the interviewer or by Brian. They made it sound like the baby was diagnosed and then Brian went back and analyzed the baby pics for white eye. No mention of Elizabeth making the original fucking discovery. Gah!!! I can't just blame NPR this time around, since Brian seems to be an asshole too but for fuck's sake, everyone, this is how women's contributions to science get minimized and forgotten.
I'm not surprised, of course. When my colleagues and I won an award for our paper in Science, the Cornell news service wrote a story about how my boss won an award rather than how the team had won an award. They even got my title wrong, and sadly they deflated it rather than inflated it. What I don't get, however, is why they think that is a better or more interesting narrative. In the case of the chemists who developed the app, the actual story is more interesting than the whitewashed one. In the case of my colleagues and I, the actual story is not less interesting.
I'm extra salty today because the physics Nobel Prize was announced today, and one of the winners was a pioneer in the field of dark matter. Vera Rubin, who passed away a few years ago, was also a pioneer in dark matter. But of course the Nobel committee didn't think to award the prize for that until after she had passed away.
The chemistry Nobel Prize is announced tomorrow. Assuming that it gets awarded for chemistry and not biology, I may be even saltier. Sigh.
