Amanda Marcotte’s article on the opposition to marriage equality is very good. It’s always been strange to hear their arguments — I couldn’t believe they were so stupid to think that seeing gay men getting married would destroy heterosexual marriages. And they’re not! They’re just afraid to come right out and say what really frightens them.
I’m embarrassed for them. You’d expect that with the importance of evidence and logic, they’d understand the words they use and the reasoning behind them. In the case of Tim Hunt, we’ve now had frenetic attempts at vindication based on:
Her words ought to have some weight, I think, and they represent a rational response to the issue.
His remarks at first seemed to me just a drop in the bucket of millions of similar ones made every day about women in the workplace, often by decent men who would be horrified to be regarded as misogynists. For me they confirmed an age old stereotype of women as trouble, so old that it goes back to Adam and Eve. But they were the drop that finally caused the bucket to flow over. They became a catalyst for a deep-seated bitterness to pour out of people, not only women, who simply felt that enough was enough. This was an outpouring waiting to happen. It needed just that little drop.
What is the bitterness about? Injustice, plain and simple. And it coincides with my own anxieties as chair of the Diversity committee. The bitterness is sustained by the strong feeling that women have not had a fair chance to succeed in science. This is a serious problem in science in general, but it is also a problem for the Royal Society. It is a fact that only 105 out of 1569 Fellows are women (6.7%). It is a fact that only 22 out of 106 of the awards and medals given by the Society over the last 5 years were given to women and that over those five years only 22% of the successful candidates on the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows and Sir Henry Dale Fellows were women.
She has just announced another pregnancy out of wedlock, but she sounds so regretful and embarrassed…apparently this was an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, which is a very unfortunate way to start a new life.
“I wanted you guys to be the first to know that I am pregnant.
Honestly, I’ve been trying my hardest to keep my chin up on this one.
At the end of the day there’s nothing I can’t do with God by my side, and I know I am fully capable of handling anything that is put in front of me with dignity and grace.
Just a suggestion, but God didn’t and won’t help you with this. What would help is sex education, availability of contraception, and willingness to use it. There is no shame in sexual desire, and getting pregnant can be a happy occasion — but when you treat it with guilt, as an obstacle in your life, and refuse to acknowledge that there are fairly easy things one can do to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, that is a problem.
It’s also a problem when you hypocritically shame other women for their sex lives.
There was a recent debate on British television between Milo Yiannopoulos and Emily Grossman on Sexism in Science. I have no idea why Yiannopoulos was even invited; he’s got no qualifications at all to be talking about this stuff. I guess he was the representative for sexism, while Grossman was there to represent science.
A very short summary:
Grossman: Hunt’s remarks were irresponsible in fields still afflicted with a serious gender imbalance, science is an environment in which we’re trying to dispel historical stereotypes that discourage women from entering, etc.
Yiannopoulos: Gender essentialism, biological determinism, men’s brains and women’s brains are different, there may be a scientific basis to why women don’t succeed as well in science. Blech, puke, argle-bargle.
Stop right there. The ‘debate’ should have come to a screeching stop the instant Yiannopoulos started babbling lies and nonsense, but I’m just amazed his eyeballs didn’t pop out of his face from all the irony pressure in his skull.
It’s bad enough that Tim Hunt has a baying mob of witches howling for his blood, now they’re unlimbering the heavy artillery: they are using satire. Exactly like a witch would do.
Frankly, I don’t even know how I managed to become a scientist. I can only name a handful of important women in science, and they are all dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I remember wanting to become a scientist when I was young, but I knew this must be a mistake; as a woman, I was better suited to a career in something more traditionally feminine, like becoming a prostitute or dying in childbirth. I likely only made it to my current position in a well-established lab by using reverse sexism, which is rampant in science.
Tim Hunt’s very bad day
Here we go again. Eight Nobel prize winners have come out to defend Tim Hunt.
They warned of a chilling effect on academics’ freedom to speak their minds after Sir Tim was forced to resign his honorary post at University College London amid pressure from social media users.
Sir Andre Geim, of the University of Manchester who shared the Nobel prize for physics in 2010 said that Sir Tim had been “crucified” by ideological fanatics , and castigated UCL for “ousting” him.
In a letter to the Times, Richard Dawkins protests.
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.
Fortunately, I’ve also already written my reply. It’s a simple question.
If you’re one of those people who called this a “witch hunt”, an “Inquisition”, a “lynching” — what would you have people do differently when an esteemed senior scientist gets up to a lectern and says something sexist, or racist, or simply idiotic?
I’m also curious, and have an additional question. How should we reply when someone says something stupid in public about evolution? If a government official were to spout creationist nonsense, for instance, would a full-throated roar of disapproval from the electorate be appropriate, or would that fall into the category of “feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness”? Would you propose that after one thought-leader says “tut, tut”, the rest of us should withdraw to a decorous silence?
Sometimes, these lines are hard to draw, and where we draw them says a lot about the biases of the delineator.
Gender Workshop, as ever, is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.
There’s been much talk over the last few years about witch hunts. Targeting Dawkins. Targeting Shermer. Targeting Hunt. Targeting anyone who happens to sit near Adria Richards. And though I think it is far from a witch hunt to be criticized by a lot of people, even by a lot of people at once, because your comments or behaviors merited criticism, for a long time I merely rolled my eyes at the inevitable, defensive backlash: “Witch hunt!”
Tim Hunt was chastised by his hosts at the Korean meeting of the World Conference of Science Journalists, and he replied with a slightly better apology.
The federation asked for an apology. And got one almost immediately. 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.”
