She was on one of the teams that did if I remember correctly. I believe they split up into three teams and developed algorithms independently from one another. What surprised everyone was when they came back, all three teams had more or less the same image. It’s been a while so I may be wrong on some details. But it wasn’t just her is my point.
For the number of times women were straight up erased from their scientific achievements I think we can keep choosing them to represent the team for a bit.
This. Men got so angry when this story dropped and took personal offense to the fact a woman did something important and valuable. The amount of times women have had their work stolen and taken credit for by some bro far outweighs the recognition.
Or maybe attribute everyone equally - regardless of gender / sex, since that doesn’t matter to what they do? You don’t fix injustice with more injustice by skipping the contributions of other teams and only singleing her out.
The media loves to make single people heroes because it’s easier to sell.
I think in reality, nobody makes anything alone.
It’s the hero myth that came to life at the time of Beethoven, of a misunderstood genius. Yes that guy was pretty good at what he did, but it was simply that he got progressively deaf and couldn’t socialize with people anymore.
From that to marvel movies stereotype of one man prodigy and media idolizing individuals with sob stories.
Look at Nobel prizes in science, they’re often multiple names, and behind each names there’s countless decades of graduate students contributions and their teams.
It’s even older: The myth of individual excellence is at least as old as the phenomenon of a distinct class of a warrior aristocracy. All throughout history, you’ll see the elite (as most historians and poets were, because a peasant working for subsistence doesn’t have the time to write deep musings about that time he got conscripted for war and stood in a line with all the other common peasants) writing of this or that great general or warrior, despite most of just about everything being done by groups.
You might know about the great heroes of the Iliad, excelling in battle by taking down a key figure of the opposing side, but most people probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the mass of “common” infantry on either side, let alone about the servants carrying the hoplites’ stuff.
You might find a lot of medieval works focused on the glory and honor of a knight, but the (comparatively) poor spear-and-shield conscripts receive attention mostly in official documents detailing the way their army was to be raised (see the section “Ninth-Century Rohirrim” here).
Even when thinking about heavy cavalry charges, for the longest time I never gave much thought to the value of coordinated cohesion between them. The knights’ charge is still a group effort, where an isolated warrior - great hero or not - would be doomed. And while we may be aware that knights had a squire, the rest of the retinue wouldn’t be clear to everyone:
Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).
(Citation copied from this entry of the same blog as before)
Ever since there has been an elite with the leisure to write and document, served by a lower class who didn’t, there has been a tendency to emphasise these elites’ individual value and omit the group effort of all the invisible people contributing to that value.
I don’t know if that is the cultural inspiration for the modern trend of focusing on single individuals or simply a symptom of a similar cause, but there is a certain resemblance that I suspect isn’t pure coincidence.
