Commentary: The problematic media portrayals of women in science

Last month the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration announced that it had imaged something unseeable. By combining data from eight telescopes around the world , a team of more than 200 researchers reconstructed an image of a black hole. But the stunning image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 wasn’t the only picture to take the internet by storm that day.

Not long after the flood of articles about the discovery was unleashed, two pictures of Katie Bouman, a researcher in the collaboration, went viral. One picture captured her excitement as her code produced an image of the black hole; the other showed her with stacks of hard drives that contained data used to make the image. News outlets grabbed the human-interest story and ran with it. However, many of their attempts to put a human face on a scientific breakthrough ended up highlighting some of the problematic ways in which they, and others, portray the endeavor of doing science—particularly regarding women scientists and their contributions. Because of her appearance and expressions in those pictures, Bouman became the face of the discovery in a way that reinforced female stereotypes and opened her work up to unnecessary public scrutiny.

On the surface, the rush to highlight the contribution of a young woman scientist to such a momentous scientific breakthrough would seem like a good thing—and in some ways, it was. Women are still largely underrepresented in STEM fields, particularly in the physical sciences, and research has shown that girls are more likely to maintain their interest in STEM when they have female role models . Showing women working in scientific fields also helps to dispel widely held stereotypes about scientists.

But things are not so simple. It’s not only important for the media to show women in science. How they are portrayed matters , both for the women themselves and for the impact they might have.

Some media outlets, such as Time , highlighted Bouman and her work in the context of the larger collaboration. But CNN and other publishers described her as the graduate student who had made the black hole image possible. Referring to her in that way is misleading and downplays her professional achievements: Although she began working on the project as a graduate student, Bouman received her PhD two years ago and has since been working on it as a postdoc. Later this year she will start a new position as an assistant professor at Caltech, which is not an easy position to get. Calling her a graduate student doesn’t do justice to her experience as an independent researcher. The CNN article later acknowledges her postdoc status and upcoming faculty position, but that doesn’t undo that initial impression, particularly for readers who don’t make it that far into the text.

The public may have enjoyed getting a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a major scientific advance, but all that attention exposed Bouman’s work to public scrutiny. Nearly all scientific discoveries are the result of large collaborations, and although it’s not an uncommon practice, highlighting one person or a small group of researchers misrepresents the wide range of actual contributions. As the public face of imaging the black hole, Bouman was criticized by internet trolls for overstating her contribution to the collaboration and taking credit for her colleagues’ work, although she made no such claim. That put her in the position of having to defend her work despite already being credited as a coauthor on the collaboration’s papers . In addition, to quiet her detractors, a male coworker felt compelled to come to her defense to vouch for her contribution and explain how academic collaborations work.

Why is Bouman the face of the black hole discovery? Although she did make a valuable contribution, she’s not the most important member of the team. Rather, it’s because she’s a woman who’s photogenic, and that drew people in. When the media highlights a woman for that reason, it perpetuates problematic and pervasive trends in descriptions of women scientists. Media portrayals of scientists are more likely to mention appearance if the subject is a woman: An analysis of scientist profiles found that women were more than twice as likely to have their clothing, physique, or hairstyle mentioned than were men. And, importantly, the tones of the descriptions were different. Whereas men came off as stereotypical academics, women were portrayed as domestic, demure, and attractive. A Scientific American article points out that for decades portrayals of women in science have been problematic, tending toward shallowness, superficiality, and tokenism. Presenting women in that way can detract from their achievements and even undermine their professionalism.

Those pitfalls were still present in articles about Bouman even when they didn’t explicitly discuss her appearance. The lack of such comments does suggest that coverage of women is improving. But because the focus on Bouman was on pictures of her, not on her work, her appearance overshadowed her contributions. Despite being subtler, that representation was still a superficial and tokenizing way to highlight a woman scientist.

All the hype around Bouman—including the misrepresentations of her and her contributions—stemmed from her photos going viral and then being picked up by media. Although people sharing things on social media may not be attuned to such nuances, those who cover scientific discoveries should take care to include women without focusing on their appearance. And it can be done: Take, for example, the New York Times and Wired . When covering the discovery, they interviewed two other women from the black hole team, Sera Markoff from the University of Amsterdam and Feryal Özel from the University of Arizona, respectively. The women served as scientific experts who explained the work and its implications, and neither woman’s appearance ever came up.

It might seem that the coverage of Bouman was more effective than that of Markoff or Özel at highlighting women’s contributions to the black hole image—by now Bouman’s picture and the fact that she wrote an algorithm are probably the only things most people remember about the whole episode. But an assessment of their overall effectiveness depends on the end goal: Are women scientists still such an anomaly that pointing out their sheer presence is valuable? There are a lot of women in science, and their numbers have been growing for decades. Coverage of their work should instead strive to normalize their presence so that, eventually, they can just be thought of as scientists.

Christine Middleton is an associate editor at Physics Today.