The Trouble with Girls

There's been a lot of talk about women in science and technology in recent months. Google's Eric Schmidt stuck his foot in it last March. Apple's Tim Cook wants more gender equality, but his company is still 70% male.

But what has attracted the most attention were comments by Tim Hunt, a 72-year-old biochemist and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, who made advances in cell division:

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Mr. Hunt said Monday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea. “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.”

The reactions to his comments have been swift and harsh. Hunt has resigned as honorary professor at University College London.

He meant the comments as a joke, but continued to defend the sentiment behind them:

“I did mean the part about having trouble with girls,” he said. “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.”

And he elaborated on his comments that women are prone to cry when criticized.

“It’s terribly important that you can criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth,” he said. “Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.”

First off, Hunt has blinders on. There is and always has been same-sex romance. Scientists can be gay like everyone else: segregating men and women won't end romantic entanglements in the lab.

Second, I really don't know where the bit about crying comes from. I worked for 25 years in software engineering, and always had women coworkers and/or bosses. My wife worked in electrical engineering for just as long, and had many female coworkers and employees. Neither of us ever saw women crying at work because they were criticized.

I wonder: in Hunt's storied career, did his criticism of a male colleague ever elicit angry shouts, obscenity-laced streams of invective or even fisticuffs? That's a typical male response to criticism. I have seen numerous violent emotional outbursts from men over the years (especially from managers). I cannot believe that Hunt was never involved in his own share of such altercations. 

Isn't an obscene rant just as unprofessional and unscientific as a crying jag?

As a man of a certain age, Hunt would perceive a swearing-filled shouting match as a proper way for scientists to settle their differences. He knows how to win such an argument: just shout back, only louder.

What Hunt is really complaining about is that he can't win an argument by shouting louder when the object of his derision starts crying. Crying disarms him and exposes him for the bully he is.

Now, assuming that Hunt really means what he says, all this loving and crying is his fault. He says that 1) he falls in love, 2) she falls in love, 3) he makes her cry.

Since Hunt is a Nobel Prize winner, I'm going to venture a guess that he ran his lab. That would mean he was the boss. I would also guess the man is rather arrogant, brilliant, self-absorbed and full of himself (he did win the Nobel Prize, so he does have reason). There's an inherent imbalance of power when a renowned boss romances an employee. Because of the potential for abuse, most workplaces strongly discourage such relationships and some even ban them.

Why? The best way to undermine any person's confidence and credibility is to make it appear they obtained their position through sexual favors. By instigating such a relationship with an employee, Hunt is torpedoing that person's career in the most callous way possible.

When Hunt criticizes a lover, the subtext is, "You are stupid. You have this job just because we had sex. My criticism means I don't love you anymore. You're going to lose absolutely everything: my respect, our love and your job. And stop crying, damn it!"

Hunt is little different from the imams and the ayatollahs who want to cloister women in their houses and hide them under chadors. Like them, Hunt blames women for his inability to work without being distracted by their gender. Hunt is the problem, not the women.

Instead of banning women from the labs, brilliant men who can't keep it in their pants should be kept out of management positions. They should work in solitary, monk-like contemplation where they won't be distracted by their inability to concentrate on the science at hand and constantly "falling in love." Which is just the euphemism men like Hunt use for "getting laid."

The real trouble with girls? Men are dicks. In both senses of the word.