It just seems inherently sexist and more mean-spirited than if they'd dealt with a male in the same role.
It's possible that you know more about the story than I do, but I'm not clear on who did what on the team, how the responsibilities broke down per member, and why everything was out of whack on the report. I don't know any of that stuff; what I've seen is that the media made a big deal about a woman researcher, was cooing all about her and she seemed to eat it up.
Then when things went wrong, it's all become a focus on her, though she's a junior member of the research team. In a strictly hierarchical society like Japan, I'd expect that the top researchers would have been responsible for the problems in the report, but instead we've seen full-page pictures of her sniveling face on the front of newspapers, cementing her culpability.
I don't know why the head researcher took his own life, except as some kind of mark of accepting his own responsibility in the STAP scandal, but if it were entirely impossible, why leave Obokata a directive to "Be sure to reproduce STAP cells"? It's possible the out-of-touch project lead may have been buoyed by optimism instead of pragmatism, but it seems like he believed it had happened -- or that's the darkest bit of suicide note trolling ever.
