A Head Rolls

A head rolls, but was it the right one? Timothy Hunt resigned his posts at UCL and the European Research Council. With a Nobel prize for his work, a distinguished and on-going scientific career what could be so important as to cause these sudden and immediate departures. Did he win the lottery and, with multiples of millions at his disposal, decide to give up working the domain he had held so dear? No, he made a self deprecating joke about women in the lab. Was it heinous, raucous or rude? Again, no. Along with saying he found women distracting, he said that if you criticised them they tended to cry. This may not have been particularly funny, nor in particularly good taste, but should this be a career terminating statement? The consensus of the comments on his utterances has been that he has just epitomised how entrenched sexism is in science. Multiple examples illustrating how badly women have been treated have been published showing how endemic this is. So, given the nature of my last post, do I think his comments justify the press furore and the subsequent outcome? Simply, no.

There exists a state of being in the scientific community where women are not given sufficient respect for their contributions. Their work is not properly valued. There is ample evidence of adverse bias in evaluating their performance. Tim Hunt’s ‘joke' may play to these concerns. Is his statement an expression of his disregard of womens’ scientific competence? Is there a history of him rating poor work by men above good work by women? As far as I can see, there has been no accusation against him for such practices. Or, has he been fair in his evaluations and given credit where credit is due regardless of the sex of the author? If the former, his subsequent pillorying is justified. However, if the latter, then a few poorly chosen words have wrought havoc far beyond their worth. Our obsession with political correctness has just claimed another poor innocent whilst leaving the guilty free to continue to exercise their prejudices unimpeded. 

This frenzied media response may have focussed attention on the issue for a short while, but the fact is that such bias needs to be addressed from within the disciplines. Tim Hunt’s guillotining by a baying feminist revolutionary mob for being a public relations incompetent does not address the core of the problem. To focus this level of attention on such a trivial episode distracts from the many serious instances of adverse sex bias that have so far passed, and continue to pass, unnoticed.