JOIN USNobel prize winner Sir Tim Hunt recently suggested that female scientists should stay out of laboratories because they distract men. Dr Jennifer Rohn, a cell biologist at University College London, hits back
Sir Tim Hunt, the British Nobel Prize-winning scientist, seems to think that female scientists
disrupt laboratories because they’re emotional and sexual. Speaking recently at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea, he 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 criticise them, they cry.” He added that he was “in favour of single-sex labs” but “doesn’t want to stand in the way of women.”
As a scientist with more than 25 years experience of working in labs – and as someone who has met Sir Tim several times and found him to be a friendly, non-offensive, typical British eccentric – I find this bewildering. How can someone so intelligent make comments like that? Not just in front of a roomful of journalists, but at a lunch honouring women in science? It’s just farcical.
He has tried to apologise. Next morning, he told BBC Radio 4 that he was “really, really sorry I caused any offence”. He went on to say that he was just trying to be “honest” about his experience with “emotional entanglements,” which he had found “disruptive.” It sounds as if Sir Tim has had a lot of bad experiences. But he really didn’t need to air them. When you win a Nobel Prize, for better or worse, you become a role model. It is simply not appropriate to make comments like this – even if he was joking when he called himself a “chauvinist”.
We’ve made a lot of inroads with sexism in science. But we still have a long way to go and comments like this just don’t help. He may have been speaking honestly, and he’s entitled to his opinion, but I don’t agree with it. In labs, women do cry. I have cried. Yes, I’ve had a bit of a weep, gone to the loo and washed my face, and then got back on with my job. But equally I’ve seen men sobbing over their test tubes.
I’ve also seen men make sexual advances on their co-workers, as well as the other way round. All it shows is that labs are full of human beings; emotional, passionate, competitive and working in a high-pressured situation. They’re thrown together in a very stressful environment. Of course, you’ll have romances and people may cry. That doesn’t mean great science isn’t being done. I’d argue that to be a great scientist you need to be passionate and have these qualities. That these can help make you a better scientist. The stereotype of the cold calculating ‘geek’ isn’t true – nor is the one about women being overly emotional.
Science has changed a lot over recent years. Overt sexism isn’t such a problem with the younger generation, and there are many measures in place to ensure women aren’t discriminated against. When I was 21, I was told to my face: “You shouldn’t be a scientist because women aren’t as analytical as men, so you should drop out now.” That would be much rarer today - but we still have problems. You go to conferences and the audience is equally split between men and women, but the panel is all-male and women don’t ask many questions. It gets to a point where everything around you is suggesting women are not equal.
The biggest problem we have now is unconscious bias. A number of studies show that given two equal candidates of both sexes, people will see the man as superior. Women have this bias as well. Why are there fewer women in science than men? When someone says ‘scientist’, the first thing that pops into you head is probably a man in a white lab coat. It’s the same for me and I am a scientist.
There’s this deeply inbuilt feeling that science is a masculine profession. It needs to be actively overcome. In the physical sciences - such as physics and chemistry - there are fewer women going into the field, and it may be due to unconscious bias. But when you look at life sciences – Sir Tim’s area – that’s an equal playing field. An equal number of undergraduates and PhD students are studying life sciences (the study of organisms and health), but then there’s a complete haemorrhage when you get to the professor level. Just 18 per cent are female.
That shows the real problem is retainment. The reasons why women leave science are complex – childcare, work-life balance, confidence. Some just say ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’. You have to work long hours and experiments often fail. You can work for eight years and not have anything to show for it.
But the other problem is a lack of women in positions of authority. You don’t have to have role models to succeed, but it does help. Although men can be very effective mentors, if there are no female professors around, you might feel like there’s no room in the club. Women do face more barriers in science than men and comments like Sir Tim’s may set us back even further.
The last thing we need is for a well-respected role model to suggest that women aren’t as capable as men in the lab – it couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Telegraph