The remarks by the 2001 Nobel Prize winner for physiology or medicine shocked a roomful of journalists and scientists at the World Conference for Science Journalists in South Korea. Though Sir Tim Hunt, a Royal Society fellow, later apologized for the commentary on women in the laboratory and resigned his honorary university position, his expression of regret came with a number of qualifiers that highlight the sexism still present in academia and the sciences.
Hunt alleges he was attempting ironic humor when he admitted that he has a reputation for being a chauvinist and then spoke about his “trouble with girls,” according to BBC News:
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry.
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The comments apparently left the audience of scientists and journalists stunned into silence, and once they were able to relay the information, the media and social media furor grew exponentially:
Nobel scientist Tim Hunt FRS @royalsociety says at Korean women lunch “I’m a chauvinist and keep ‘girls’ single lab pic.twitter.com/Z9NhykaTPv
Connie St Louis (@connie_stlouis) June 8, 2015
Hunt’s “trouble” with girls appears to be that he doesn’t completely understand his own ingrained sexist attitudes. While his comments are explicitly sexist, his follow up stating that he doesn’t want to “stand in the way of women” and the attempt at an apology with the BBC clearly shows his cognitive dissonance on what his chauvinism represents:
I’m really sorry I said what I said. It was a really stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists, and what was intended as sort of a light-hearted ironic comment apparently was interpreted deadly seriously by my audience. But what I said was quite accurately reported.
His regret appears to be over the interpretation of his words being taken seriously, though he admits to the accuracy of the words being relayed through the media. Also, his addition of “in the presence of all those journalists” seems to indicate he believes his error was making comments in front of those who can broadcast his words, rather than the words alone.
Hunt then follows up on his comments about women crying in the lab, but apparently he is quite serious about that specific issue in science:
It’s terribly important that you can criticise people’s ideas without criticising them, and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth. Science is about nothing except getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.
Hunt comes across as being concerned that people, especially women in science, were offended, but is unconcerned that the stereotyped behavior of women that he was attempting to joke about is actually something he believes “diminishes” his entire field of endeavor.
Even so, his intentions may very well have been benign, but it’s precisely this lack of self-awareness that reinforces subtle sexist stereotypes and behaviors by men in places of influence in STEM fields. Hunt, in his attempt to clarify his remarks, “mansplains” how his interactions with women hurt the science, and though he later says in a statement that he was trying to be “honest” about his “own shortcomings,” the remarks ended up focusing on irrational bouts of crying as a generalized attribute of women in academic science.
“I think it was clear he was trying to be funny. But people will interpret his comments as having a kernel of truth underneath,” Dr. Jennifer Rohn, a cell biologist at University College London, told the BBC. “And as a Nobel laureate, I know he’s a human being, but he does have some sort of responsibility as a role model and as an ambassador for the profession.”
The Royal Society distanced itself from Sir Hunt’s remark, and the University College of London did as well, confirming that Tim Hunt resigned from his honorary professorship over the matter of his South Korea talk.
“UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality,” the university said in a statement.
