“Women Respond to Nobel Laureate’s ‘Trouble With Girls'”

Someone pointed me to this amusing/horrifying story of a clueless oldster.

Some people are horrified by what the old guy said, other people are horrified by how he was treated. He was clueless in his views about women in science, or he was cluelessly naive about gotcha journalism. I haven’t been following the details and so I’ll expressing no judgment one way or another.

My comment on the episode is that I find the whole “nobel laureate” thing a bit tacky in general. People get the prize and they get attention for all sorts of stupid things, people do all sorts of things in order to try to get it, and, beyond all that, research shows that not getting the Nobel Prize reduces your expected lifespan by two years. Bad news all around.

P.S. Regarding this case in particular, Basbøll points to this long post from Louise Mensch. Again, I don’t want to get involved in the details here, but I am again reminded how much I prefer blogs to twitter. On the positive side, I prefer a blog exchange to a twitter debate. And, on the negative side, I’d rather see a blogwar than a twitter mob.

P.P.S. Someone in comments objects to my term “clueless oldster,” so let me clarify that it’s not intended to be a particularly negative phrase. I would not be surprised if someone were to call me a “clueless oldster” myself; that’s just what happens.

82 thoughts on ““Women Respond to Nobel Laureate’s ‘Trouble With Girls'”

  1. agreed… Twitter is good for humor & snark, and for passing along worthwhile links, or catching breaking news… it is horrid for carrying on intelligent, meaningful, or nuanced discussion of issues or events.

  2. This is not a “clueless oldster” problem. This is a problem of thoroughgoing, institutionalized sexism in the academy, which women are supposed to agree to find funny in order not to be trashed as harridans (as Mensch has trashed the women reporting Hunt’s words). Here is a vastly more nuanced take: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/30/the-guardian-view-on-the-tim-hunt-affair-an-explosive-combination-of-science-sexism-and-social-media

  3. I stumbled over the controversy by accident reading a couple of other blogs and have not read the account that Louise Mensch is discussing but it seems like a) Hunt made a fool of himself, probably trying to be funny but humour that ,might work for native Brits was not appropriate for Koreans with, presumably, less than native fluency in the language and little knowledge of British humour.

    The story went wild with all sorts of weird and wonderful embellishments to the point it seemed to have little relationship to actual facts.

    It was like having Fox News and the Daily Mail combine forces.

    • As written by Louise Mensch. It wasn’t Korean conference participants that were outraged and then transmitted that through social media. The source stems from Connie St Louis, a London-based, British journalist.
      Rather, the joke was received with genuine laughter, as can be heard from a recording of the incident.

      • Of the people who are certain the story is disproved by hearing laughter on an audio tape, I wonder how many have spent enough time in East Asian countries to immediately think of nervous laughter, or more specifically Nervous laughter and why it isn’t funny outside of Korea. Having visited Korea half a dozen times and Japan (similar effect) a dozen, that’s the first thing that came to mind.
        Given
        I wasn’t there, so *I* don’t know if they thought it was funny. I rather doubt it, given:
        a) their letter.
        b) Fact that less than 20% of Korean scientists are female, and fraction of lab directors and senior professors even lower, making to one of the silliest developed countries to say this.
        c) the likelier meaning of the laughter

        One thing I know for sure, having visited~45 countries over the years, is that I would *never* draw any conclusions from a snippet of audio tape from a country whose culture I didn’t know really well. It can be hard enough face to face to know what’s going on.

        Inter-cultural differences can be tricky and humor is really tricky.

        • Humour is indeed tricky and many times conditional on culture. And that goes double for British comedy. (Though Mr Bean seems to be universally well received.) Lies on the other hand are more straight-forward. The recording may not disprove the story, but it does prove the dishonesty of its source. Connie St Louis is quoted to say: “After he’d finished, there was this deathly, deathly silence. Very clearly, nobody was laughing – everybody was stony-faced.” I don’t know the truth, so I weigh the evidence. And in this case, I feel that the original source of the story has been discredited.

          Of course, the debate continues regarding the words uttered, the impact of those words on society and the responsibility of the person that uttered them.
          But yes, I do absolve him from malice intent and sexism. Which is the story you are talking about. I even absolve him from the crime of making a crude joke and upsetting people. However the real story is that in today’s society, a joke can kill you. And you you will never know which joke until too late. So you better be serious.

        • I have not heard the tape or visited Korea but I have worked with Korean nationals and nervous laughter is not approval. I recognised this situation in your second link In the Western sense, it almost sets up the offended party to retort with “Oh, so you think it’s funny?” thus escalating the issue. But when viewed in respect to saving face, this makes total sense.

          A Korean co-worker of mine re-entering Canada ran into a visa issue and the reaction was exactly that when she laughed nervously.

      • Emily, have you heard this recording, and if so, can you tell me where it can be found? All I can find are indirect references seeming to emanate from an article by Louise Mensch who hardly seems an unbiased source. Incidentally, the statement from the korean organisation of women scientists is on the public record.

  4. If that NYT story is all you’re going on, I guess “clueless oldster” is being kind. I’m glad you linked to my short post on it, which I hope will make people pause and look a little more closely at the facts before making up their mind. The story that was originally circulated about Hunt’s remarks has been pretty soundly demolished, as has the idea that Hunt is “clueless” about women in science. Elsewhere, he has expressed the mildly controversial notion that women don’t face any particular barriers in their entry into the sciences, and the somewhat more controversial notion that their underrepresentation at the top of the hierarchy may not be very important. (He doesn’t seem to be personally very interested in positions at the “top”. Thinks science is best done working in the lab.)

    I totally agree that blogs are far superior to twitter. Athene Donald’s recent post offers a good corrective to the distortions that have circulated in social and mainstream media.

  5. One day Andrew, you’re going to say something innocuous on this blog, but because of some microscopic shift in the Zeitgeist the mob will descend on you and you’ll loose your job and reputation. You’ll think that having a long record of being a nice reasonable guy, with typical left of center New Yorker opinions will help you, but you’ll discover too late the mob doesn’t care. You still loose your job and reputation. When that happens, I’m just going to laugh and say “clueless oldster”.

    Shoulda’ defended free speech when you coulda’.

    • Anon:

      I have no idea why you think that having “typical left of center New Yorker opinions” will help anyone.

      Also, I don’t expect to be losing my job. But, if I do, I guess your comment should make me feel a little better, because now I know that, if I do lose my job, it will be making at least one person happy. So, I don’t think it will happen, but if it does, I hope you enjoy your laugh. Until then, I guess you can enjoy the prospect of laughing at me. And, hey, maybe that’s just as good!

      • It was my point that being a leftist doesn’t seem to help. Most of these people, including the subject of this post are completely conventional left or progressive types. They think they’re Lenin, but they find out too late they’re Trotsky.

        Maybe you will survive. On that last post about the corrupt principle you scrupulously avoided raising the possibly she was hired despite strong evidence of corruption because of her skin color. I have no idea whether that played a role or not, but it’s easily withing the realm of the possible. So as long as you continue to pay minute attention to the changing whims of the twitter mobs and aggressively self sensor yourself, maybe you’ll keep your job.

        That is after all the real gaol of these kinds of tactics. Just like assassinating anyone who publishes a Mohammad cartoon, the real point is to get the mass of wet noodles like yourself to rigorously self censor. You seem to be good at it.

      • I take it from your sarcasm you consider that Aaronson affair as evidence the mob mentality isn’t out of control. Everyone else drew the opposite conclusion from that little scuffle.

    • On the one hand, I agree that twitter mobs are a bad thing–kinda scary.
      On the other hand, it’s really a pet peeve of mine when people conflate the constitutional right to free speech with the ludicrous idea that people should be able to say whatever they want without consequences.
      Also, your comment below “raising the possibly she was hired despite strong evidence of corruption because of her skin color” is actually kinda racist. but don’t worry! I have no intention of gathering a twitter mob against you.

      • They may have decided to hire someone of her skin color and searched for a candidate within that pool. Whether they did or not is called a “fact” and mentioning it isn’t racist in the slightest. What you’re doing is dishonestly trying to shut down debate before facts can even be ascertained. You want to automatically win the debate before it’s even begun. As such your part of the same pattern of underhanded tactics illustrated by the twitter mobs.

        I didn’t conflate anything. I never mentioned a constitutional right to free speech at all. The people involved aren’t Americans and don’t come under the US constitution anyway. Free speech existed before the constitution and is a good thing separate from any particular legal reference. That’s what I argue for.

        At this point I don’t care what he said. There’s probably a tenured radical feminist somewhere in the US saying all men are rapists and should be castrated. Hell, there’s probably half a dozen at each major university. If our republic can get along fine with people like them saying “whatever they want without consequences”, then it can certainly stand to hear the meanderings of a Nobel Prize winner and it’s not going to cause all the males to run outside and put women in concentration camps or whatever. In fact, it could well lead to less sexism not more.

        So I say let people speak their minds without loosing their jobs. I want to know what people really think. I am not afraid to hear the good, bad, and ugly of their real thoughts. Stop with the brown-shirt tactics and let people speak.

  6. This is a rather bizarre blog post.
    It has nothing to do with your topic, statistics, or inference or social science.
    It is, by your own admission, a story you don’t know much about.
    And the thing you link to is about 6 weeks old, so it’s not news.
    So I wonder why you posted it.

    It’s also rather self-contradictory.
    You say you express no judgement, but call Hunt a “clueless oldster”.
    You say you don’t want to get involved, but by posting it you are getting involved.

    The ‘story’ is literally that – completely made up. He did not say women should be segregated in labs because they cry. His comments were not met with ‘stony silence’, as a published audio snippet reveals.

    If anyone is interested in the facts, rather than the stories fabricated by agenda-promoting activists, see Thomas’s blog or Debbie Kennett’s
    http://cruwys.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-tim-hunt-affair-call-for-evidence.html

    • Thanks for the link to European Women in Maths’ posting of the correspondence between the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Tim Hunt. It is indeed good to see that there has been respectful correspondence on the subject.

      A note on Andrew’s calling Tim Hunt a “clueless oldster”: Sir Tim and I are in the same age cohort. Remarks like his were not uncommon forty years ago from people about twenty years his/my senior, but it was really surprising to hear them from someone currently under 80.

      Also, in case you haven’t yet seen them, the photos referred to in the KOFWST note, “On a more hilarious mode, see the hashtag #distractinglysexy where women have been posting pictures of themselves in their labgear, signs on labdoors warning against mixed gender labs, where floors may be wet because of tears etc.” really are funny.

        • I’m not sure if your P.P.S. was (partly) in response to my comment, but I’d like to clarify that I wasn’t objecting to the use of “clueless oldster”. I was trying to point out that the issues involved have been around long enough that very few STEM people his age would even think of making remarks like his. So I agree that he was “clueless,” but think the “oldster” part is irrelevant — and in particular, not an excuse.

        • Agree about the age issue, but maybe that is a US versus UK thing?

          I thought #distractinglysexy was amazing. When I saw the title in the queue I thought that was what the post would be about.

        • Elin:

          This post was all about how I think the whole “nobel laureate” thing is a bad idea. But just about nobody cared about that point! What bothered me even more was that only one person commented on the following post.

        • Especially since the oldsters usually are the people in power in academics it’s quite problematic to excuse opinions and behaviour by older scientists by age. Being clueless also usually means you at least don’t care and that’s highly proplematic being in a privileged position.

        • Daniel,

          I don’t see being clueless as usually meaning you don’t care. I see it more as having a blind spot. Metaphorically, some people need to be hit over the head with a frying pan to make them aware of something that a light tap with a feather might accomplish for another person.

        • In my experience most people who appear to be “clueless” are usually not interested at all to question their privilege. If someone tells them how certain behaviours affect women, they mostly start to ask more and more seemingly naive questions until – at some point – they start go get aggressive and whine how it’s impossible for them to act in any way at all anymore (“If i can’t just hit on everyone at any time, I’ll be alone and without sex forever! I can’t flirt without being creepy!” ,”I can’t make sexist jokes anymore? The world will go down!” etc.). I don’t believe in cluelessness much, anymore. Of course we all don’t understand and don’t know many things, but people who actually care are not clueless over and over again. They actually listen and try to understand and they don’t make everything about themselves.

        • My remarks are based on my own experience. It sounds like your experience has been different from mine. Different data, different conclusions.

        • Or different interpretation of similar data. But your experience may give me back some hope that not most clueless people also do not really care.

        • Daniel,

          I would guess that it is different data rather than different interpretation of similar data. My reasoning is along the following lines:

          1. Your experience is with people you have had contact with; mine is with people I have had contact with. These are very likely different populations.

          2. The “someones” interacting with the people considered are different(in my case, predominantly me or people I know; in your case, presumably you or people you know). So this is similar to having interview data obtained from two interviewers with no common training in questions asked or other aspects of interviewing.

  7. One thing I’d really like to get Andrew’s readers’ opinion about is the strange double role played by the science journalists who broke the story. After Tim Hunt’s talk Connie St Louis, Deborah Blum and Ivan Oransky (of Retraction Watch) decided to broadcast (a very selective quotation of) his remarks on Twitter. But St Louis was an incoming member of the board of the World Federation of Science Journalists, which was hosting the conference at which Hunt was speaking. Blum and Oransky were members of its program committee. That is, Hunt’s hosts undertook to publicly humiliate their guest after he agreed to give an impromptu toast in honour of women scientists and, apparently, fumbled what was intended as a self-deprecating joke. In their reporting and subsequent interviews about the event, they have never disclosed this strange “conflict” of interest. (I put “conflict” in quotation marks because I don’t understand what they were thinking. To me, they scandalized their own event, i.e., they worked against their own interests, and did something ethically questionable in the process.)

    • Maybe Basbøll needs to hear Tim Hunt himself on the topic:

      Some excerpts:

      “I did mean the part about having trouble with girls”

      “I just meant to be honest, actually”

      http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2015/jun/10/nobel-laureate-tim-hunt-sorry-women-scientists-video

      He seems to be saying that because he fell in love with people in the lab, and “people in the lab” (presumably only girls?) fell in love with him, it is “very disruptive to the science”. Maybe the conclusion should be that *he* himself should not be in the lab, since he seems to the catalyst for all these girls who go weak-kneed at the sight of Sir Tim?

      I’m pretty amazed that people are defending him even after hearing this recording. The trouble with boys is that they feel so damn entitled to everything. Just because he has a Nobel Prize doesn’t actually mean anything in this context. Notice also that a lot of Nobel laureates came to his defence? Were any of them women? Oh wait, they don’t usually give women Nobel prizes, those are reserved for their male advisors:

      http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/

      And what about a regular office in a regular company? Is having male and female colleagues in a regular business environment disruptive too? How about the army?

      And I guess they don’t they have gays in the UK? When two men work together, is it perhaps, maybe, maybe, possible that there may be “disruption in the science” due to sparks flying between them? I guess the next time Tim Hunt stands up to give a keynote he can counterbalance his previous comment by a “the trouble with boys” comment. The reason that’s never gonna happen is the above-mentioned sense of self-entitlement of men.

      I think that it would still have been OK if Hunt had immediately apologized, instead of giving the ridiculous interview above defending himself (the real trouble with scientists is that they usually cannot admit they were wrong about something). That astronomer guy who had made a TV appearance with scantily clad girls on his shirt was able to clean up the mess he made by just issuing a sincere apology.

      • Sorry Shravan, but there are too many details we disagree about here. The best I can do is point to you someone who held more or less your view of the case until he looked more closely at the facts and found himself compelled to publicly apologise for his poorly informed (indeed, misinformed) characterisation of Tim Hunt as a sexist in his writing. You can find the retraction in David Kroll’s “personal note” at the beginning of his piece in Forbes. Like Kroll, I am “reasonably certain that [Hunt’s] words on women in science were self-deprecating … and that his overall message was to congratulate the Korean women scientists in attendance for their ability to perform at a level that becomes all the more impressive in the face of outdated attitudes about women in science as exemplified by his self-parody.” That he “seems [to you] to be saying” something else in two out-of-context soundbites doesn’t invalidate my weighing of the evidence, nor, especially, the much more difficult investigation that must have come before Kroll’s admission that he was wrong to say more or less, like I say, what you are saying now.

        • OK, Basbøll . I will read the retraction of Kroll; I am open to the possibility that I am totally wrong about Hunt.

          But you are silent on the above interview I link to. Why is that? Could you put in context for me and for the other readers the following two sentences from the above interview:

          “I did mean the part about having trouble with girls”

          “I just meant to be honest, actually”

          I would love to hear how these two sentences can be reconciled with everything else you are saying. Feel free to make up a context in which this would be a plausible and completely reasonable statement (the interview I link to above).

        • Like i say, it’s really too long a story and too many details. He was asked to make a comment on the phone in an airport, apparently not really as an interview, and we have no idea what he was asked to confirm. Like his original remarks, he had to improvise something to say, and he is (as far as I’ve now been able to tell) an open and frank person. He was sincerely apologising for the offence he (was being told he) had caused, but he probably did not know that his remarks had been presented as those of a “Victorian” “misogynist” on Twitter, nor that his obvious joke — a modest proposal — about sex-segregated labs had been presented as a serious suggestion.

          Like Kroll, I think we can only be “reasonably certain” about what he actually said and meant during those few extemporaneous minutes in Seoul. But anyone who looks at his record of service (and the many youtube videos of his lectures that are available) can easily determine with much greater certainty that this guy is not the “monster” he jokingly described himself as. If you want to know a little about the sort of “journalism” that construed him as such a monster, you can read this post of mine.

          I apologise in advance, but I’ve studied this very closely, and written very carefully about it, so if you want to talk to me about it, you’re going to have to want to get into some details and some context. The man was egregiously wronged by science so-called journalism. That such things happen will not come as surprise to readers of this blog.

        • Basbøll, your response is wholly inadequate. I’m asking you to explain to me the context in which his recorded comments are acceptable. I’m not asking for a deconstruction of the whole story. I am not interested in condemning the man as a whole.

          I can agree that he not a monster, and I can agree that he has done much more for the good of the world than you or I would ever do, and deserves credit for that. I can even agree that maybe he should not have lost all his honorary appointments, that the reaction was extreme. I even agree that the world would be better off if he was on ERC grant committees deciding on the fate of scientists, both men and women.

          But my priors are set once I have heard his recorded comments, which you dismiss as off the cuff and not really an interview. And your defence that we have no idea what he was asked to confirm is totally unacceptable to me and clearly shows your biases.

          He clearly says “I did mean the part about having trouble with girls.” What plausible statement could he be being asked to confirm? Maybe whether the kimchi is really as good as they say it is in Korea?

          What I expected you to say at this point was, yeah, he compounded his stupid comments by saying what he did. But no. You are standing up and even defending this idiotic comment from him.

          This is what I find so unacceptable about this; you don’t have to deny his greatness as a scientist to admit that he did something that was totally unacceptable, and that includes acknowledging that this recording is highly damaging to the claim that he was joking, as is now being reframed by people like you.

          Even if we grant that Tim Hunt was just joking when he said all this, even men have to man up and recognize that such jokes are just a way to put down women. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a joke or whether women can take it or not. For that reason alone, one should not rise to Tim Hunt’s defence.

          Let him apologize and move on. He probably would not have lost any appointments if he had just acknowledged his mistake right away. People say stupid things all the time and I can bring myself to agree with the others complaining here Hunt got hung out to dry. People who say stupid things have to back down once they are called on it, but he didn’t do that initially. He’s done it now, it seems, but the damage is done.

        • I think if you agree he is not a monster, not a misogynist, we are talking past each other. The case against Tim Hunt was originally made in those terms. And then everyone took comfortable middle-of-the-road positions defending or condemning him. I condemn the original reportage (and the BBC’s unserious coverage it) and the institutional cowardice of UCL in not saying all the obvious things you are saying.

          If you want to say that possible symptoms of seeming mild sexism among 72 year-old scientists (who are demonstrably not sexists in practice) is a serious problem in science that needs an “adequate response” by imagining a possibly “acceptable” context in which it might better just have been passed over in silence, well, then, I don’t know what to say.

        • I’ll say this though: if Sailer opposes me on this topic I must be on the right side of this debate. In that sense it was a relief to read Sailer’s sarcastic response to my comment.

    • Yes the science journalists don’t seem to have handled it the best; yes Tim Hunt acted like (and continued, when given a chance to clarify, to act like) a “clueless oldster”. Also, as noted by Martha above, it has been nice to see a lot of young and enthusiastic female (and male) scientists handling it with humor and confidence on Twitter.

    • Agree, that should have been disclosed and there does seem to be a need for “finders of fact” and penalties for inappropriate behavior if established.

    • I actually didn’t understand why this point was stressed, precisely because ‘conflict’ needs to be put in quotes. I guess maybe they were partly motivated by a feeling that Tim Hunt screwed them over personally by coming to their conference and making what I assume they genuinely (at least at first) believed to be sexist comments? Or maybe they wanted to make sure that they weren’t held responsible for the comments?

      • I think the appropriate response to feeling betrayed by Hunt’s remarks would be to never invite him back. Certainly, if they were embarrassed by what he said it seems pretty irrational to turn it into a twitterstorm.

        If I had been invited to speak, and managed to put my foot in my mouth (this happens sometimes) I would hope my host would apologise on my behalf and emphasise all the good things about me that motivated the original invitation. But only as a response to actually expressed offence. (Obviously, I’d let the audience walk away with whatever judgments about my character they happened to form.)

        You last point is interesting, and not nearly as innocuous as you make it sound. You are essentially saying they pre-emptively threw him under the bus to cover their asses. He said he had been “hung out to dry”. That would be very accurate if the possibility you suggest is what happened. And I’d say it’s very poor form for a host.

        But the other side of it is, in any case, more important. The fact that they may have been covering their asses is precisely what required full disclosure of their host-guest relationship to Hunt.

        • I wasn’t defending them at all. I think they acted horribly. I was just speculating on the role their status as conference organizers may have played in their motivations.

    • I understand how you would be unhappy with Hunt’s treatment by some of the media downstream from the initial report but he was giving an (essentially) public speech at a luncheon organized by KOFWST (https://kofwst.org/english/main.php). Putting part of a public speech on twitter seems like a fair thing to do. Maybe the extra context makes the speech look a little better but it doesn’t change the core issue—his words belittled women in science in a very unimaginative way and Hunt understands that (see the KOFWST letter and his response, link at: http://www.europeanwomeninmaths.org/resources/news/kofwst-receives-apologies-tim-hunt).

      Let’s admit that it’s a deep problem when a well known British scientist can go to Korea as an honored guest and replay sexist tropes at a luncheon organized by a group called “Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations”. I’m pretty sure that’s a group that didn’t need any _more_ jokes about how women are too emotional for science.

      • “Replay sexist tropes” strikes me as deliberately uncharitable word choice. He’s clearly opposing the tropes. The speech closes, “Congratulations, everybody, because I hope—I hope—I really hope that there won’t be anything holding you back, especially not monsters like me.”

        • By the way, I personally really appreciate that Hunt took the KOFWST letter at face value and responded with a proper written and public apology. That’s all that needed to happen on his part since the real issue is that the attitude he expressed is still deeply embedded in many people. It’s not about Hunt at all. I don’t think his defenders are doing him any favors by focusing on the one part of the speech he already apologized for—whether it was intended to be funny or not. I haven’t listened to the whole speech but Deborah Bloom said it was just fine.

        • Krzysztof:

          I clicked on the link. The article is interesting but I find the term “hipster” to be obnoxious and unhelpful, just a lazy way for someone to indicate they don’t like somebody.

        • I’m sorry I couldn’t find anything better, but I was looking for something that was moderate rather than strident and it’s a hard topic to write about. Maybe somebody else will come up with a better reference.

          I understand that you don’t like the term but I thought in this particular article it wasn’t used as a bludgeon, just to indicate that the speaker often thinks their sexism is not really sexist because it’s ironic. Maybe I’m missing some other context on how “hipster” gets used.

    • On general principle I think that it is important to speak up in the face of things even if you are an insider, perhaps especially if you are an insider.

      But as an insider you do also have a special role and that means that before going public with something (or resigning you position because of it) you should bring it to the group. You should not use being on a program committee as an excuse for not speaking up about something that is wrong, but you should give the program committee or conference organizers a chance to do something collectively first. It’s always hard to know “what if” but in this case if the people on the program committee had gotten together to preemptively make a response before individual members started tweeting things out, most likely things would have been handled differently at least by slowing things down.

      To me this (and the fact that you have journalists on a program committee creates a world of conflicts) was the problem. From what I can tell, none of them were saying “we do not speak for the program committee” and none were posting COI disclaimers (of course on Twitter that’s not easy but you can just at least do numbered tweets). Seemingly none of them thought to even seek a response from the conference organizers or the lunch organizers.

      Also, since this post and discussion is close on the “criminal referral” retraction in the NY Times, as journalists I am particularly concerned that they didn’t do basic things like seek a comment from Hunt or attempt to get comments from regular audience members.

      • I think insiders have a responsibility to mitigate harms, not to expose the wrongdoing itself. (If someone makes a mistake within an organisation, and you point it out to them, and they help you to fix it, and no long term harm results, then no one has a further duty to “speak up”.) Of course, if they try to mitigate harm and thwarted by other insiders, then they may have a duty to become whistleblowers. But, like you say, they at no point behaved like the insiders they were, and they did not disclose their insider status when they “reported” the remarks. It’s totally baffling to me.

  8. They didn’t just “not handle it the best”. They caused the situation—one that a 72-year old scientist who had spent his whole career in a lab curing cancer for us was not equipped to handle. What he was “clueless” about was how to deal with the new media.

    • “A 72-year old scientist who had spent his whole career in a lab curing cancer” who isn’t equipped (appropriate) for various public advocacy roles…agreed.

        • It’s also what made him a target. His critics were precisely saying he had special responsibilities as a representative of the scientific establishment. I agree with you (and Tim Hunt agrees with you) that it in fact doesn’t mean anything of the kind.

      • That’s not at all what I was saying. There are plenty of people with ordinary social skills who don’t do well facing a twitterstorm. Tim Hunt had a long career of service for science, encouraging young people and mentoring young scientists. All he needed was ordinary an ordinary institutional framework and the basic decency that goes with it.

        In any case, if he was not qualified to give a toast celebrating women in science then it was the very people who hung him out to dry that should have taken responsibility for that decision.

  9. I actually think you should get more into the details of this one, since one, you are an academic with some public standing; two, this incident shows gross lack of integrity by institutions (University College London for example). Something you wrote about at length in the previous blog post. Rather than conduct an honest investigation, discuss the matter with Tim Hunt and ask people involved in the conference before forcing his resignation, they took action based on the unsubstantiated and knee-jerk outrage of social media. Surely, this concerns all academic’s relationship and trust with their employer?

    And to be clear, the problem of institutional sexism is completely separate from the Tim Hunt incident, which is an issue of (potential) miscarriage of justice. Even his opponents must agree that everyone deserves a fair trial before execution.

    Disclaimer: I am appalled at the treatment of Tim Hunt. It was character assassination, whose consequences are irreversible. How he was treated does not follow from what he said.
    Besides, even if he had made a really half-baked joke, and then regretted it and apologized, that should be allowed! Do people truly understand the implications of a policy that forbids any kind of statements that are perceived as inappropriate?

    • Surely, this concerns all academic’s relationship and trust with their employer?

      UCL wasn’t Hunt’s employer in an ordinary sense. His appointment as Honorary Professor was not salaried, and such appointments typically involve no teaching or research duties. So Hunt’s resignation bears less on trust in an employment relationship and more on status and prestige maneuvering in the highest reaches of academia.

    • > Do people truly understand the implications of a policy that forbids any kind of
      > statements that are perceived as inappropriate?

      We will soon find out – at my own university, the president recently gave a speech which
      included the following:

      “And if you are told by someone Chinese, Jewish, Muslim or gay that what you’ve said is hurtful or insensitive, ‘I didn’t mean it’ isn’t the appropriate response. That just makes it all about you, and what you meant, when they’ve had the courage to tell you what they feel. Better is, ‘I’m sorry, that was insensitive. I won’t do it again.’ And then don’t do it again.”

      This may seem well-intentioned, but as a colleague of mine pointed out, a policy along these
      lines would prevent us from discussing the ideas of, for example, the Dalai Lama, Edward
      Said, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pope John Paul II. More subtle is what Emily alluded to: the
      proscription censures any statements that *could be construed as* offensive, regardless
      of actual intent or context.

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