A Recipe for Trouble: The NYT's cookery-infused obit for a pioneering female rocket scientist

Yvonne Brill with President Obama/Office of Science and Technology Policy

On Saturday, The New York Times published an obituary for Yvonne Brill, 88, a scientist famed as a pioneering woman in the United States' rocket system programs and as the inventor, in the 1970s, of a critical propulsion system to keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

The lead, however, didn't mention any of that. It read: "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said.' And in case you – like so many of us – found that wrong-headed in the extreme, that's also a lead that's disappeared. If you call up that obit today, you won't find that opening paragraph. The stroganoff bit has been replaced by a different description, that of 'brilliant rocket scientist.' (For comparison, you can see the editing changes highlighted at NewsDiffs.)

The story of this quick change event offers a fascinating look at the power of social media outrage to make a difference in such cases – and of the growing recognition of the important(and historically undervalued) role of women in shaping modern science. Matthew Hall, of U-T San Diego, collected the immediate fury of response on Twitter in a terrific Storify. My own attention was caught by a couple of tweets from a couple of very well-known science writers:

@edyong209: Rocket scientist dies. NYT obit leads w her cooking skills, husband and kids. Oh just fuck off. http://nyti.ms/13GUqax #STEM

@stevesilberman: OY. Good to know this brilliant scientist "made a mean beef stroganoff" in the lede of her obit! http://nyti.ms/13GUqax

Yong later noted that he'd rapidly received a cascade of retweets totalling more than 800. Multiply that by all the other outrage and you can understand why Times public editor Margaret Sullivan also took to Twitter to assure the many people who had contacted her that she also found the story problematic. Shortly later, the paper posted a new version of the obit, moving the "brilliant rocket scientist" line into the beginning – but did not annotate the change or note the reason why.

To be fair, the Times does annotate corrections when the facts are wrong. Neither it – nor any other publication – tends to footnote moments of insensitivity. It is possible, of course, that Sullivan will address the issue in her own column at some point. I sent her a tweet asking about that but she has so far not responded. (She did, I should note, give a shout out to that gold standard of writing about women scientists, The Finkbeiner Test, established by the wonderful Ann Finkbeiner, and beautifully explained here by Christie Aschwanden). And UPDATE, she later posted this analysis, again agreeing that the story clearly undervalued Brill's contributions.

Not that the NYT needs to call attention to the misstep. Plenty of others have done it for them. At The Washington Post, for instance, Melinda Henninberger expressed some sympathy for the Times obit writer, Douglas Martin. He had been trying for something warm and light, she suggested, not to insult the accomplishments of the scientist. After all, The Post's obit, written by Martin Weil, also noted that Dr. Brill had been dedicated to being a good parent and partner, that she had seen the balancing act as one of her more important jobs.

Others were less accepting. "Awful NYT Obit for Rocket Scientist Rhapsodizes About Her Beef Stroganoff" wrote Doug Brill at Jezebel. Prachi Gupta, at Salon, mocked the approach of introducing an acclaimed researcher as wife and mother first. At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz labeled the approach obviously sexist.

My personal favorite critical response, though, was a parody obit over at that excellent blog network, Last Word on Nothing. The title on Jennie Dusheck's post is "Family Man Who Invented Relativity and Made Great Chili Dies" and it begins:

He made sure he shopped for groceries every night on the way home from work, took the garbage out, and hand washed the antimacassars. But to his step daughters he was just Dad. ”He was always there for us,” said his step daughter and first cousin once removed Margo.

Albert Einstein, who died on Tuesday, had another life at work, where he sometimes slipped away to peck at projects like showing that atoms really exist. His discovery of something called the photoelectric effect won him a coveted Nobel Prize.

And you have only to read those first two paragraphs to understand why, no, we should not be particularly sympathetic to writers who think its charming to portray a talented scientist as a cook first. And, frankly, we should be equally unsympathetic to editors who pass this kind of story telling along without a blink, as far as anyone can tell.

And that we should also keep calling this kind of thinking out, until the message gets through and no one needs to be reminded that pioneering rocket scientists – female and male alike – deserve to be honored without reservation for the work that made them pioneers to begin with. And that balancing act? We all need to work harder at that.

— Deborah Blum

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