Damn, I thought I was going to be able to drop it now but nooooooo, there’s too much new nonsense flying around – all in aid of the important cause of Doing Nothing when a celebrity scientist says sexist things at a science conference because hey he was only joking. Sexist jokes are never in any way any kind of problem at all whatsoever, just as racist jokes are not, just as anti-Semitic jokes are not, just as homophobic jokes are not. Jokes cannot ever be a problem because they are meant to be funny? Can’t you crazy social-justice warrior prude witches get that through your crazy lynch-mob heads?

The Daily Mail does its more unbuttoned version of the Times story, with all caps and exclamation points.

Revealed: ‘Sexist’ Nobel winner went on to praise women scientists in SAME SPEECH, continuing after criticised comments by saying ‘Now seriously…’

The SAME SPEECH I tell you.

And he said “now seriously” which PROVES that he was joking before and if you are joking THAT MEANS YOU’RE NOT BEING SEXIST BECAUSE IT’S A JOKE.

A leaked report on the controversial speech that forced the resignation of Sir Tim Hunt suggests he also praised women scientists.

The Nobel prize-winning scientist was castigated after he said women in laboratories either fell in love with their male colleagues or cried when criticised.

Crucially, it now appears Sir Tim followed his jocular comments with the words ‘Now seriously…’ before heaping praise on women.

“Crucially”? Please. “Jocular” comments can be just as sexist as serious comments. I could tell you about a “jocular” racist remark I heard someone make a few weeks ago, but it would make me want to heave.

Following widespread criticism of his ‘sexist’ comments, he resigned from his honorary position at UCL and positions at the Royal Society and the European Research Council.

But last night a report emerged that added crucial context to his remarks to the conference of female science journalists Seoul, South Korea.

According to The Times, a report of the event by a European Commission official who was at the lunch was suppressed by the commission.

He wrote: ‘This is the transcript of Sir Tim Hunt’s speech, or rather a toast, as precise as I can recall it: ‘It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. 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. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?’

According to the official, Sir Tim immediately said after: ‘Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt an important role in it. Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.’

Note that the “transcript” isn’t really a transcript, because the mystery official said it was “as precise as I can recall it.” That applies to the account given by Blum and St Louis and Oransky too, as far as I know, but they at least were pooling three memories and not relying on just one. It’s not self-evident that the “suppressed” transcript trumps the first one.

But that’s a quibble, because in any case the new version doesn’t make the huge difference that people are claiming. That’s especially true since he said afterwards that he was serious about some of it.

The Daily Mail is hopeful about a rebellion:

There are now over 2,000 signatures on an online petition to reinstate him to his post at UCL.

Meanwhile, members of the university’s governing council are mounting a potential rebellion over the university’s handling of the affair – with it now being claimed that talks next month could lead to Sir Tim being reinstated.

Many are said to feel that it over-reacted to the social media furore over his remarks in South Korea more than a fortnight ago.

Claimed by whom? Who are the many? Said by whom?

Who knows. Meanwhile BishopBlog has more details on how the media got a lot of the facts wrong.

My concern is about the number of signatories of Ballentyne’s petition who have got themselves worked up into a state of indignation on the basis of wrong information. There are three themes that run through the comments that many people have posted:

1. a) They think that Tim Hunt has been sacked from his job
2. b) They think he is ‘lost to science’
3. c) They think University College London (UCL) fired him in response to a ‘Twitter mob’.

None of these things is true. (a) Hunt is a retired scientist who was asked to resign from an honorary position.  That’s shaming and unpleasant, but an order of magnitude different from being sacked and losing your source of income. (b) Hunt continues to have an affiliation to the Crick Institute – a flagship research centre that recently opened in Central London. (c) UCL are explicit that their acceptance of his resignation from an honorary position had nothing to do with the reaction on social media.

There are people who insist that UCL is spinning – but I don’t see why they’re so sure that UCL is spinning while Tim Hunt is not. How do they know Tim Hunt is not spinning?

So why do people think these things? Quite simply, this is the interpretation that has been put about in many of the mainstream media. The BBC has been particularly culpable. The Today programme on Radio 4 ran a piece which started by saying Hunt had ‘lost his job’. This was a couple of days after the UCL resignation, when any self-respecting journalist would have known this to be false. Many newspapers fuelled the flames. An interview with Boris Johnson on the BBC website added the fictitious detail that Hunt had been sacked by the Royal Society. He is in fact still a Fellow – he has simply been asked to step down from a Royal Society committee. It is interesting to ask why the media are so keen to promote the notion of Hunt as victim, cruelly dismissed by a politically correct university.

It is interesting, isn’t it. I think it’s basically because so many people just don’t want to have to go to the trouble of ceasing to make contemptuous jokes about women. I think for a lot of people it’s a cherished part of their Traditional Culture.

Some day this story will end. Some day.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

You think it can’t get any more ridiculous, but it keeps doing exactly that.

This time? A “leaked” transcript of what Tim Hunt said at that conference in Korea supports his account that it was a joke, so it’s all good and he should be given all his honorary positions back. This is according to the Times, so I haven’t read the whole article because paywall. But even the first paragraph is absurd.

A leaked EU report has increased the pressure for Sir Tim Hunt to be reinstated to his academic positions after it revealed a markedly different account of his speech about the “trouble with girls” in science.

Has increased “the pressure”? What pressure? There are some aggrieved assholes complaining, but so what? Journalists do love those vague agent-free statements about bodiless “pressure” from no one in particular.

Even more bizarrely, the Independent reports that Dawkins demands an apology from everyone in sight.

Professor Richard Dawkins is demanding an apology from those who criticised Sir Tim Hunt over a leaked EU report he claims gives vital context to comments the Nobel laureate scientist made about his “trouble with girls” in laboratories.

Oh yeah? Well I demand that Richard Dawkins apologize for a whole long list of things. Fat lot of good that will do me.

Sir Tim left his position at the Royal Society and University College London (UCL) after telling an audience of female science journalists at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea he found it difficult to work with girls.

He also reportedly said: “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.”

His remarks were condemned as sexist and unhelpful and he resigned shortly after the backlash. He also apologised publicly for his comments.

Well, he apologized and then unapologized and complained and blamed and generally pitched a huge fit.

Now, an account by a European Commission official printed in The Times expands on the comments he made during the conference.

The official quotes Sir Tim as saying: “It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. 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. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?

“Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt an important role in it. Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”

Yes – so? How does that change anything? How is that a version that dramatically reveals that Tim Hunt didn’t act like a sexist jerk at that lunch?

I don’t think anyone ever denied that he thought he was being facetious. Maybe this is news to Dawkins, but it’s not news to us: a hell of a lot of sexism is in the form of tedious, labored, unfunny “jokes.” Who hasn’t sat stony-faced through a million of them? Come on. Nobody thought Hunt was giving a serious scientific lecture on gender differences. We all knew he was “bantering.” That doesn’t change a thing.

The official also claimed that Sir Tim did not “thank women for making lunch”, as was previously reported.

Previously reported where? I don’t remember seeing that.

Dawkins tweeted about this putative exoneration of Hunt.

He told The Times: “This phrase […] is the final confirmation that Tim Hunt’s remark was light-hearted banter against himself.

“Without wishing to join a reverse witch-hunt to root out the individuals responsible, I can’t help hoping Sir Tim will receive an apology.”

An apology for what? For saying that a senior scientist should not be swanning around the world making contemptuous jokes about women scientists? I’m not going to apologize for that.

UCL and the RS are also not impressed.

A spokesperson for UCL declined to comment any further when contacted by The Independent. The Royal Society said it would not be commenting further on the matter at this stage.

There’s nothing there.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I missed one by Deborah Blum with a lot of important details. It was last Tuesday, so I was busy catching up after the conference.

(I know I’m posting a lot about this, but it has many parts, and also many conflicting accounts. Plus I get like a dog with a bone, and we already know that.)

Last week—along with science writers from more than forty countries—I flew to South Korea to participate in the 9^th World Conference of Science Journalists. The conference had paired my lecture (Pulitzer Prize winner, 1992, beat reporting) with one by Sir Tim Hunt (Nobel Prize winner, 2001, Physiology or Medicine).

There’s one thing I didn’t know – that their lectures were paired.

Some media organizations have stepped in to defend Hunt’s comments, which he now claims were an attempt to be entertaining. As a co-panelist sitting next to him at the luncheon, I heard a different story. His speech, he told me, was rooted in “honesty,” not humor.

I’m seeing people claiming UCL changed its story. Maybe UCL didn’t change its story; maybe Tim Hunt wasn’t telling the truth about UCL.

The conference started out on a good note. Our lectures, or so I think, were solid. I talked about the importance of history in good journalism; Hunt talked about the importance of creativity in good science. The organizers regarded these parallel talks as a clever way to balance the contributions of science and journalism.

Afterward, we were invited to a luncheon hosted by the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations. Female scientists in South Korea are a definite minority; a recent study found that they represent only 17 percent of the working researchers in the country. This is slightly less than the average across Asia of 20 percent.

Ah, so that was the setup. Blum and Hunt gave twinned lectures, and then went to that lunch hosted by the female scientists.

So they were very proud to have us there and to showcase their work. Because Hunt and I were the morning speakers, they also asked both of us to stand up during the lunch and make a few remarks.  Anyone who has done this knows that the operating principle is kindness. I talked about the ways that women make science smarter; Hunt began also by paying tribute to the capable female scientists that he knew.

A few remarks. Not a talk, but a few remarks, and probably not prepared remarks. Hunt started well…but he didn’t finish well.

Unfortunately, he decided that wasn’t enough. But “let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” he said.

Why? Why did he? This wasn’t an evening at the Groucho with Kingsley and Conkers and the gang. Why did he do that?

If you are a working woman, the word “girl” tends to be a signal flare, a red light warning of problems ahead. He continued. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry,” he said. Next he made a case that science might work better if we separated researchers into single-sex laboratories. Of course, Hunt emphasized, he didn’t want to “stand in the way” of women.

Of course not. He just wanted to portray them as fools and argue that they should be in separate labs by themselves.

Blum and Connie St Louis and Ivan Oransky talked about how to report Hunt’s comments, and agreed on what they did: St Louis tweeted the story and Blum and Oransky retweeted her account.

Our idea was just to get it on the record. In the week that followed—after the story simply exploded—Hunt would resign from an honorary professorship at University College London and from the advisory board of the European Research Council, which had sponsored his trip to Seoul.

He would also tell The Guardian that he had been “hung out to dry.” He would insist that he had only been joking and that no one had asked him to explain his position. At which point, I jumped back in to counter those statements. Because, as I detailed here, I’d made a point of asking him for that very explanation.

Hunt hasn’t been fully truthful, in short. That’s understandable, because it’s all very shaming, and people flail around in the face of shame. He’s been flailing. But unfortunately a lot of ill-disposed people have been treating his account as Definitely True and everyone else’s account as Obviously Lies, and a lot of others read the distorted accounts and believe them. A lot of people are convinced that Hunt was fired from a job as a professor at UCL. Not true.

Some people have described all of this—the eruption across Twitter, the resulting storm of media attention—as taking on the shape of a kind of feminist witch-hunt. You’ll certainly see that in this opinion piece in Canada’s Globe and Mail.

I could not disagree more.

I do have sympathy for anyone caught in the leading edge of a media storm. But if we are ever to effect change, sometimes we need the winds to howl, to blow us out of our comfort zones.  Because the real point here isn’t about individuals, isn’t about Tim Hunt or me.

The real point is our failure, so far, to make science a truly inclusive profession.

Exactly. And wouldn’t it be nice if people like Brendan O’Neill and Brian Cox and Richard Dawkins could grok that and help instead of going into a panic about putative lynch mobs destroying Tim Hunt?

The real point is that that telling a roomful of female scientists that they aren’t really welcome in a male-run laboratory is the sound of a slamming door.

Yes it is – and yet so many of the pundits saved all their concern for the guy slamming the door, with none left over for the women on the wrong side of it.

Let me quote now from a letter that the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations sent to Tim Hunt regarding his statement:

“As women scientists we were deeply shocked and saddened by these remarks, but we are comforted by the widespread angered response from international social and news media: we are not alone in seeing these comments as sexist and damaging to science. Although Dr. Hunt is a senior and highly accomplished scientist in his field who has closely collaborated with Korean scientists in the past, his comments have caused great concern and regret in Korea.”

That’s another thing I didn’t know about. I wonder if Dawkins considers the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations a lynch mob.

I interrupted myself to tweet that question at him. He won’t answer, but it’s worth a try.

They also noted that although Hunt belatedly called his remarks an attempt at humor, he had earlier defended them as “trying to be honest.” (That was certainly what he said to me among others.) His remarks, the letter said,  “show that old prejudices are still well embedded in science cultures. On behalf of Korean female scientists, and all Koreans, we wish to express our great disappointment that these remarks were made at the event hosted by KOFWST. This unfortunate incident must not be portrayed as a private story told as a joke”.

They asked for an apology – and got it. Hunt stopped flailing and sent them a real apology.

Hunt wrote that he regretted his “stupid and ill-judged remarks.” He added: “I am mortified to have upset my hosts, which was the very last thing I intended. I also fully accept that the sentiments as interpreted have no place in modern science and deeply apologize to all those good friends who fear I have undermined their efforts to put these stereotypes behind us.”

Great. What a pity he’s letting people in the UK paint him as a martyr to baying witch-hunting lynch-mobs of PC feminists. He didn’t paint the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations that way, so why is he not protesting when his defenders do so?

Blume ends with optimism.

When we do make a noise, stand up for what’s right, have an open conversation about gender balance in science—even if that conversation is conducted as a virtual shouting match—we remind each other of the essential importance of equality. And we move, all of us, in a direction that matters.

I wish. Not all of us do. The O’Neill-Dawkins faction doesn’t.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I mentioned this public Facebook post by David Colquhoun from yesterday.

When the Hunt affair first came to light, my first reaction (June 10, below), was to describe it as a “disaster for the advancement of women”.

I was wrong.

Women have come out of the affair very well. The light-hearted ‪#‎distractinglsexy‬campaign was a good start. Now we are seeing a backlash, mainly from more-or-less old men who think that UCL was wrong to accept Hunt’s resignation. That has only prolonged the unpleasantness for Hunt, but at least it’s given us the names of some surprisingly backward people.

In the last few days I’ve had rather unpleasantly aggressive letters from a handful of people. telling me that I’m wrong to support UCL’s decision to accept Tim Hunt’s resignation. I can only speculate whether their motive is to defend academic freedom, as they claim, or whether their aggression stems from a well-hidden feeling that Hunt’s right.

Guess what? They are all from senior men.

I’ve had nothing but support from young people, men and women. I often urge them (in a different context) not to show respect to their elders, but not betters, when they get things wrong.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB, Tim Hunt