Moving on! Just a couple of weeks ago, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt let the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea, in on the secret of successful science, and it’s get them skirts out of the lab. Not out of research entirely of course — just into their own, segregated lab, because of the possibility for hot lab bench lovin’. “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” he reportedly said (in a speech that was tragically unrecorded, but which took place in front of a big crowd of people who agree that yeah, he totally said that). “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry!”
Bitches, amiright?
But again, he doesn’t want to stand in the way of their research — that’s why he wants them to have their own labs, so everyone can get their work done without worrying about the romance. And the crying.
Lest you think that poor Dr. Hunt is being slandered, and that his remarks are being mischaracterized, he assured BBC Radio 4 that while he was “really sorry that [he] said what [he] said,” but that he “did mean” part of his remarks and that he was “just trying to be honest.” Again: You try to be honest, and bitches cry. (This, and their lack of male co-authors on their research manuscripts, is why women will never truly succeed in scientific fields.) He told the interviewer that he had, in fact, fallen in love with people in his lab, and that people had fallen in love with him (primo catch that he is), and that it’s “disruptive to science.”
Hunt resigned his teaching position at University College London and his position on the European Research Council. In the meantime, female scientists took to Twitter to express their displeasure. Astrophysicist Sarah Tuttle gave ‘er in a series of tweets criticizing his “backwards, draconian, and inappropriate” attitudes.
Every one of her tweets on the subject is worth reading. Possibly out loud, as a monologue, with swelling music and applause afterward, if you can arrange it.
Also readable, although slightly less monologuable, are the female scientists who tweeted pictures of themselves on the job, apologizing for being #distractinglysexy. (And yes, before your boner starts writing any notes, I’m sure that a woman in a Hazmat bunny suit can, in fact, be desperately sexy. They’re just going for an effect here.)
(Whatever you do, don’t check out the SkyNews debate between Dr. Emily Grossman and smug bastard Milo Yiannopoulos in which he says that “the science is very much still out” on the question of whether men’s brains are better suited to science than women’s; argues that women are actually “structurally advantaged,” not disadvantaged, in science; argues that if Hunt’s comments discouraged you from a career in science, “um, how committed were you really in the first place…?”; throws in some bizarre comment about how gay people can “basically get away with murder” and can be “bitchy” and “nobody complains”; and says that none of this is a big deal because if Hunt was your granddad at dinner, no one would even notice what he said; and then commenters deluge Dr. Grossman with sexism, antisemitism, bad science, and suggestions that she get back in the kitchen, the existence of which Yiannopoulos denies, saying it’s “right out of the damsel in distress playbook.” Don’t watch that. Just stop after the #distractinglysexy tweets.)