Tim Hunt should treat female scientists with the respect that he enjoys

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/10/tim-hunt-women-scientists-nobel-prizewinner

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Women, eh? Can’t work with ‘em, can’t complain about them without all bloody hell breaking loose on Twitter. What’s a scientist to do?

I’m a great fan of the different varieties of outrageous sexism that we get exposed to on a fairly regular basis – I particularly like the “no woman is my equal” kind – and this week we’re seeing another variety being taken for a gentle canter around the ring, with Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt’s comments about the problems of having women in the lab.

Related: Nobel scientist Tim Hunt: female scientists cause trouble for men in labs

In case you’ve been living under a rock, or possibly hiding under a rock in case you fall in love with Hunt, he announced to a room full of female scientists and journalists that he has “trouble with girls”: “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.”

This was tweeted by Connie St Louis, who is a scientist, journalist and a woman, and who presumably was watching the talk through a veil of tears as she fell in love. Hunt has since apologised (albeit an apology if anyone was offended kind of apology), and explained that his comments were meant to be humorous.

Who among us hasn’t, when given the opportunity to speak to a room full of women journalists and women scientists, felt that it’s time to break out the material about how over-emotional women are, and how women should be working in segregated labs? It’s funny because it’s true, #ammirite, girls?

Of course, the painful truth about humour is that if no one is laughing, then it isn’t funny – insisting something is a joke is not a get-out-of-jail-free card to absolve yourself from making toxic comments. And what is true is that science struggles with diversity, being largely populated by white men, like Tim Hunt. In this context, the joke really isn’t funny – women still fail to get taken seriously in many areas of science. And as long as we assume this is women’s problem, with all the crying and whatnot, then we are not going to see any change.

The chap doing the IT flatly refused to believe I was the keynote speaker, because Professor Scott is a man

Consider what happened to women in computer science in the west. Women were well represented as undergraduates until the 1980s. When we started to get computers in the home and they started to be seen as a male interest, fewer women completed computer science degrees. This shows that it’s scarily easy to affect how people choose what they’d like to do with their lives.

By positioning science as an essentially male occupation we make it harder to get women into science, harder to keep them in the industry, and harder to acknowledge and promote the female scientists who do make it through. I’ve turned up at a conference to give a keynote speech, only for the chap doing the IT to flatly refuse to believe I was the keynote speaker, because Professor Scott is a man. I wonder if that’s ever happened to Hunt. Only kidding! The IT guy would have probably fallen in love with him. Hunt knows that some people are gay, right?

I’ve run a lab for more than 15 years now, and not only do I hardly ever fall in love with any of my post-docs or students, I find that it’s possible to work with both men and women without anyone crying. Often, treating people with the sort of respect you yourself enjoy is a really good place to start. Even if they are women.