When loving, well-meaning men in my life don’t understand the problem with gender separation, I try to write.

What Happened

What Tim Hunt Said

“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 criticize them they cry.”

What Tim Hunt Said In His Apology 

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

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. Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.”

So, why is what he said such a big deal? Let’s pick apart his statement chronologically.

“Let Me Tell You About My Trouble With Girls”

To me, and to many professional women, we are now expecting Tim Hunt to talk about how he dislikes attending pink-princess themed birthday parties and shrieking blonde pony-tailed 8-year-olds, because that sounds like a group of girls with which he, or I, or some PTA parents might have trouble. Because “girls” is the operative word in that sentence. Putting aside the fact that this statement sets up sweeping generalizations about half of the population (or more like 1/8th if we were defining girls as actually young members of the human population), “girls” carries with it a host of derogatory connotations. “Girls” implies young, immature, silly, and giggly. Interestingly, I might say that “boy” implies the same, except maybe also with “into digging up worms.” But Tim Hunt doesn’t refer to “girls and boys” in the lab — he refers only to the girls. 

Now, that isn’t so bad. It is insulting and behind the times, and generally inadvisable at a scientific conference with any women, or really any men who appreciate women on any level, and it passively puts down and belittles women in STEM and their accomplishments, but it really is not worth the backlash.

“Three things happen when they are in the lab.”

Woo-hoo! More sweeping generalizations coming right up!

That’s okay, is he going to talk about how women bring different life experiences to STEM fields than men bring and it’s important that women’s perspectives help guide the direction of scientific inquiry and product design? Is he going to say that for the good of science and engineering, we need to recruit the most talented people to STEM fields and that not including half the population (women) in the pool of possible scientists and engineers is short-sighted and self-limiting? Oh! I hope he talks about how when women are involved in scientific discovery they have access to higher-paying jobs which begins the long cycle of slowly integrating true gender equality in our society!

“You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

Womp womp. So, he boils down the essence of women working alongside men in science to entirely emotional realms, completely leaving out the science. 

So, “You fall in love with them.” Presumably, he’s not just talking about himself. Although, to be completely honest, I’m not sure what the problem is. I’ve worked in labs with men and women who were single, dating, married, exes, attractive, unattractive, queer (we’ll skip that gay men obviously can’t do science because of the ‘love’ thing for now) or whathaveyou. The biggest supporter of Tim Hunt I know is a product of his own parents meeting at work. The workplace, even the scientific one, advisably should but need not necessarily be a place void of emotion. 

Tim Hunt would probably say that romantic feelings for somebody clouds your ability to interact with them purely, and so it can color the truth of the science. And this is really even worse. Because this not only asserts that women are purely emotional (remember no mention of logical or scientific contributions when women are in the lab), but also that given that women are emotional (again, according to Tim Hunt), they detract from science. This not only asserts that women’s emotions are wildly out of control (falling in love with whoever happens to be in the lab — “hey, we have a mutual interest in micropipeting!”) but that emotion cannot be separated from work. Segmenting work and personal life may not be the play for Mr. Hunt, but this statement shows a lack of respect for that choice or even the ability to make it. Pitting “good science” against “falling in love” is an interesting choice, and not one that I quite understand. 

The kicker is, because he prefaces this with “when women are in the lab,” he is not claiming this about men. This statement disregards that men fall in love with their coworkers, too (hell, sometimes it’s even mutual), and so even if we’re pretending that romantic attraction is the worst thing in the world when it comes to research, he puts blame for his perceived troubles on the women. 

That is really what this statement boils down to: he puts blame on women for his own shortcomings. And it is this idea that pervades scientific communities and acts as a major barrier against women in STEM.

“When you criticize them, they cry.”

More sweeping generalizations, essentially calling women weak and unable to handle truthful feedback. I really do not see why I should have to explain why this is an unacceptable thing to say, but I suppose I can try. 

I would wager that women, on average, cry more and are more comfortable crying than men. This is for a whole host of reasons, including engrained cultural masculinity that is also a problem, but I digress. Tim Hunt has already insulted an entire gender pretty readily and thoughtlessly, so it’s not strange to me to hear that in Tim Hunt’s long career as a scientist, he has probably made a woman or two cry. You know, it’s not even strange to me that crying happens in the lab. As said before, emotion and logic need not be separated, and I can envision a world in which I spend years working on a project to discover that when it came down to the wire I had made a simple mistake under the stress and in my own frustration, I might cry. That doesn’t sound far-fetched, and it doesn’t sound like a problem. 

I guess I just do not believe that every woman that Tim Hunt has ever worked with cries when she is criticized, and that no man has ever felt equivalently frustrated or hurt, but not cried. I also guess I just do not believe that the brilliant women Tim Hunt has worked with are so afraid of criticism that they cry at every turn. There are many reasons I don’t believe this — some being personal (I cry tears OF JOY when someone gives me feedback and I can noticeably improve), and some being a simple faith in humanity that the scientific institution has effectively weeded out most people who do not believe in actively improving themselves and are resistant to change for the better. 

So, maybe Mr. Hunt is talking about one or two bad experiences, but those are all he has to go by, and so a much higher percentage of women he has worked with have been resistant to criticism than the men. That is a plausible explanation why he could have confused limited experiences with an entire gender. Not an excuse, but a plausible explanation. 

So all in all, he makes sweeping generalizations about women, and while he says nothing of their accomplishments in the way of science, asserts that their presence in the lab detracts from all of science and basically they should just stay away. 

Let’s look at it this way: I could make an equivalently brash and insulting statement like “Three things happen when men are in the lab. They hit on you, they get all the credit when you do joint collaborations, and when you criticize them they get defensive.”

The Apology

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

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. Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.”

“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.”

As I argued before, I do not see how falling in love with somebody in the lab puts people on an uneven playing field. Unless he is talking about his time perhaps as or as attracted to a superior, in which case I can see how that detracts. But that also sounds like a personal problem. If I fall in love with somebody at my place of work — and let’s say, for the sake of argument, they don’t fall in love back — I do not see how that bars me from being the same rational, thinking human that was granted the position in the first place. I guess I simply do not see it as a problem. If they fall in love back, cool, now I’m dating somebody and one of us might consider leaving because that could get awkward, but for now it’s okay, let’s keep doing our jobs. If they don’t, that’s cool, I’ll get over it because it can’t have been that serious. 

If we are talking about superiors, though, that’s an entirely different story, and I don’t blame Mr. Hunt for being distracted by it. But it also blames the presence of women in the lab for this awkward situation. It creates this sort of “well, this is a problem, and we were here first so finders-keepers”-y tone. He took a personal problem that he had, and blamed not himself and his own inability to separate work and his romantic feelings, but women. 

So, I guess this kind of owns up to that message, but really only partially.

“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. Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.”

I think most people would agree that it’s terribly important, in science, to be able to criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them. I certainly see this as an important factor, and most scientists probably do as well. But here’s the thing: this statement paints all women as weepy messes unable to cope with being criticized. Aside from the fact that if I make someone cry, I think about what I might have done to facilitate that instead of discredit them as unable to cope, the fact of the matter is this is a “Tim Hunt” problem, not a women problem. If he is really about the science and emotions should be entirely separate from the lab, and he believes he has chosen his words carefully so as to criticize the ideas rather than the individual, he should not care if he makes anybody cry. If he holds back from “getting at the absolute truth,” that is his fault, and he blames women for feeling guilty. 

The bottom line is Tim Hunt is an internationally renown scientist, who spoke at an internationally watched event. With his honor and notoriety comes a responsibility to choose his presence and message carefully, and he either meant exactly what he said, or no longer deserves a public stage for his inability to do so.