Tim Hunt the victim of self-righteous feeding frenzy, says Richard Dawkins

[Goblinmonger]

So I'm sure that other room is going to be aghast with cries of DAWKINS and calls for him to shut up and all that other stuff, but I'd like to discuss this more rationally here. From the article:

Professor Richard Dawkins has claimed Sir Tim Hunt was the victim of “a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness” when he quit his job in the wake of controversial comments he made about women working in laboratories.

Dawkins said the reaction to the 72-year-old Nobel laureate’s comments had been “disproportionate” and gone through schadenfreude into “cruelty”, in a letter to the Times.

Hunt provoked a backlash on social media after he reportedly said the “trouble with girls” in laboratories was that “you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry”.

In his letter to the Times, Dawkins said: “Along with many others, I didn’t like Sir Tim Hunt’s joke, but ‘disproportionate’ would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.”

(emphasis mine)

More at full article

I think Hunt is just some old nerdy guy who is likely on on the autism scale that had NO clue how what he said would be taken. He was trying to make a funny. Is it kind of sexist? Of course. Was the reaction kind of over the top? I think so.

What I'm guessing few of the religionistas and apologists and faitheists will actually quote is what I bolded above. Dawkins doesn't like what Hunt said.

Anyway, discuss...

[Rainforestgoddess]

1. Brian Cox said the same thing

Will he also be condemned?

[Goblinmonger]

2. Well, he isn't DAWKINS!!!

and people don't have Google Alerts on him and he isn't one of the four horsemen of the atheist raping Apocalypse, so probably not.

In case people want to refer to it when the inevitable shitstorm of Dawkins bashing happens, you can read the whole thing.

[trotsky]

3. "Disproportionate" is a good word here.

Hunt's "joke" (if indeed he intended it to be one) was horrible and sexist. I think your comment about Hunt is probably spot on (high on the autism spectrum), and the hatred he's gotten is just ridiculous. The pope has said far worse about women, homosexuals, and the transgendered, and yet he is praised here on DU.

[qnr]

10. I've heard repeatedly (including quotes from Hunt) that it

was a joke.

[AlbertCat]

4. It's just the kind of joke....

..... I'd expect a 70-something scientist to make. He didn't mean it to be a serious statement about the emotions of women scientists. It was supposed to be absurd and a little non-PC for effect. It would have passed with a bunch of rolled eyes and forgotten if the over-sensitive hadn't freaked out. It will not destroy women's places in science or anywhere else. Pointing out a 70 year old egg head may not be up to the minute on social issues is not revelatory.

[Curmudgeoness]

5. I think that the reaction goes too far as well.

Actually, I think the reaction to a lot of non-PC things goes too far. Maybe that is because I am older and have seen a lot of sexism in my work life. I have also seen how far it has come from when I started working. Until a new generation who has not known a time when we were not PC are older, and all of us old farts are gone, this is bound to happen. I really do not believe that Hunt meant any harm to women. If I find evidence to the contrary, I will change my opinion.

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Dawkins seems to be mumbling.

It is almost as if he has his foot in his mouth.

[deucemagnet]

7. Hunt is from an era when science was a boys' club.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that that's changing quickly in this day and age, especially in biology. Half of the graduate students at the lab I post-docced in were female. Half of our department is female and they outrank the males. The chair of our department is female. Most of my students are female, and more that half of my A-students were female. The most gifted students I've taught were about 50-50 male-female.

[onager]

8. Report from another board

Amidst much eye-rolling (as already noted in here), the women in one UK lab hung a hand-made sign on the door:

SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC LAB!
NO CRYING
NO FALLING IN LOVE

As for women's progress, I can sure attest to that in the field of aerospace. When I started out, women engineers were incredibly rare.

In one company, we had a woman mathematician/engineer who had several newspaper articles etc. written about her. She figured she would never get hired, so she stopped in and filled out the job app on her way from the beach. Still wearing her swim suit. She married a male engineer who loved cooking and cleaning house. Which was good, because she hated both of those things.

By the time I left a couple years ago, my immediate boss was a woman and so were several layers up, all the way to Vice-President of Engineering Support.

Funny note about that: when we worked in Egypt, the company had to give a man the title of Vice-President even though he had a lower title (Director) and actually reported to the woman V-P. The Egyptians had made it clear they wouldn't take a woman executive seriously, so the company went thru a big charade of using the guy for meetings etc. With his temporary title of V-P.

[Yorktown]

9. As so often, Dawkins is spot on.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. It wasn't just a joke, though

After it was first reported, he went on the BBC to say he was sorry, but then said he meant most of it:

"I did mean the part about having trouble with girls," he said. "It is true that people - I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me and it's very disruptive to the science because it's terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field.

"I found that these emotional entanglements made life very difficult.
...
On his remarks about women crying, he said: "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 but getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33077107

He's 72, and seems to have retired from active research in 2010. His positions now are honorary or advisory, and I think it's reasonable for organisations to decide his advice is not really worth having any more. Some have just said "he's wrong, his remarks are nothing to do with us"; others have asked him to resign. I think that's a reasonable reaction.

I don't think anyone should be saying he's "likely on on the autism scale". He's a successful scientist who has been in demand for speeches and positions on scientific councils and similar. Invoking autism seems like trying to excuse his views as "not his fault". Here's an hour-long BBC programme about him:

[onager]

12. Hunt Thanks Female Scientists for Their Support

The beleaguered UK scientist Sir Tim Hunt on Saturday thanked the hundreds of female scientists who have written to support him in the wake of the furore triggered by his controversial remarks about women in science...

“My inbox is now bulging with touching emails from young women scientists who have been kind enough to write and thank me for inspiring them and helping them on their way,” Hunt told the Observer yesterday. “It has also been of great comfort to me to see many women at the top of science testifying for my record in supporting women scientists.”

Top female scientists who have expressed support include physicist Dame Athene Donald, biologist Professor Ottoline Leyser and physiologist Dame Nancy Rothwell. All decried his jocular remarks, but described in warm terms his past support for young scientists of both sexes...

However, he did acknowledge that his “idiotic joke” had touched a nerve. “My comments have brought to the surface the anger and frustration of a great many women in science whose careers have been blighted by chauvinism and discrimination,” he said. “If any good is to come from this miserable affair, it should be that the scientific community starts to acknowledge this anger, recognise the problem and move a lot faster to remove the remaining barriers.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/20/sir-tim-hunt-gratitude-female-scientists-support-joke