Sir Tim Hunt - women should stay out of labs because they distract men

[MurielWoods]

and they cry too easily and make men fall in love with them

I shit you not

Distract? Biology, you see - constant boners everywhere.

This is why I plumped for physics, there are very few boners in the world of physics, and those that you do get are usually caused by the subject matter.

(seriously, though... a very silly comment by Mr Hunt)

I think anybody with the sense that God gave gravel could have told him that his remarks wouldn't go over well. Most men know better than to say stuff like this.

Did a bit of looking up.

His wife was his student.
He had an affair with her and broke up her first marriage.
Classy huh.

Are all these women falling in love with each other or are men involved? If the former, I really didn't realise that fecking science labs were the no.1 pulling ground for lesbians. How high brow .

Fortunately the nature of science is that he hasn't actually undone his decades of good work. History is littered with great scientists who were in various ways iffy people.

Not always true, Errol - if you make a big enough clanger, then people start to pull apart your previous work as well, and you do lose reputation. Not necessarily for this sort of comment though.

If the work was good it will stand, having people look critically at the work of eminent scientists is surely a good thing. So science shouldn't suffer - I don't care about his reputation.

It was an idiotic thing to say but surely it makes no difference to the content of his actual research. His research is either true or false and it will stand up to, or maybe not, to further research in this area.
To conflate his research with this stupid statement isn't helpful

If the inability to keep it in your pants is a problem then swallow some KBr and get on with it. Mind you, a bit of entanglement didn't do Dorothy Hodgkin's work any harm.

I think he was trying in an extremely awkward way to be funny and say what he thought (he wasn't funny and should have thought before he opened his mouth)

I just hope that this ill advised statement of a slightly geeky, but brilliant scientist (and his subsequent resignation) does not impact any advancement in science

He's a brilliant scientist. I don't think he should have resigned.

It's a terrible statement & now have you seen what Boris has said - imagine if these people were saying openly racist statements, there would be an outcry.

Boris should resign too

I fully accept he is a brilliant scientist and this stupidity doesn't alter that. However, this brilliance also put him in a position of authority where his judgments on students and fellow workers were likely to be taken very seriously. He has now revealed a bias against a large group of people. There may well be women out there who are wondering if their progression suffered because of his attitude. Did he objectively assess all the people he worked with by the same criteria?

He wasn't in a recruitment position, iirc. The comments are laughable, archaic, unworldly, but not worth esigning over. He should have been reprimanded but I think the whole reaction is ott.

The comments are laughable, archaic, unworldly, but not worth resigning over

Would you say that if his comments had been "the trouble with black people..."?

No, probably not. I am not entirely convinced that you can compare what he said to racism though.

Why can't you compare it to racism. Someone in a position of authority and respect has stereotyped a large segment of the population. Why is sexism seen as less serious?

What has Boris said?

www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/boris-johnson-calls-for-sir-tim-hunt-to-be-reinstated-10319671.html

Says Sir Tim should be reinstated because girls do cry more than men.
His telegraph column.

So what if women (on average) cry more than men? The fact that one academic finds that hard to deal with is hardly compelling evidence for the desirability of 'single sex laboratories'. If there are gender differences, having mixed teams which make good use of those supposed differences might actually be a jolly good thing.

Gosh, missed ever beginning of this thread because I was at work in the lab. Managed not to fall in love though floor another day... god, Mondays are so hard! One of the guys in my group said he thought it was wrong for TH to lose his job over it because although it was a stupid thing to say, if it had been the other way round and a woman had said men fall in love and go round burping and farting all the time, people would have just laughed. His comment kind of riled me but luckily I managed not to cry...

*missed the beginning
*though for ankther
damn fat thumbs!

I agree Mrsruffalo

Being a group leader at Crick means he's in a recruitment position by default - every phd and post doc would be OK'd by him. Of course there's no way of knowing, but if his opinions did put him off employing women, it could well have stunted career growth for some female researchers.