26th June 2015 1:00
By Blue Tutors
A Nobel prize winning scientist has recently caused outrage by making comments to the effect that women should not be permitted to work in laboratories with men. Speaking at a conference, the scientist Tim Hunt said that science would benefit from the introduction of single-sex labs, on the grounds that women are too distracting. He claimed that “girls” cause men to fall in love with them and cry when criticised. Apart from causing me to bang my head repeatedly against my desk, his comments got me thinking about how on earth to combat blatant sexism in academia with my undergraduate students. How do I tackle this, when a Nobel Laureate makes comments such as these, and a top scientist appears on TV with shirts depicting naked women?
A good answer, interestingly, seems to have come from twitter users who work in the sciences. After Hunt’s comments were made public, a slew of ironic pictures were posted by women of themselves at work in labs with the hashtag ‘#distractinglysexy’. Male scientists too have joined in, poking fun at the idea that they might not be able to work with female colleagues because they cry too much, or they find them too distracting. This I was happy to see, because Hunt’s comments were offensive to men as well as women. When I teach gender and society with my students, I am at pains to emphasise that gender is about relationships between men and women, and the subordination of women is not something that can be addressed without also scrutinizing the role of men in society.
But perhaps the most important thing the twitter-using scientists have done is simply to laugh at Hunt’s comments. Whilst rampant sexism cannot merely be laughed off, we could do worse than to pour an appropriate level of scorn on ignorant behaviour such as this. Tutors would do well to have serious discussions with their students about gender-bias in academia, but I believe it is also helpful for our students to see other members of academic communities responding with derision and incredulity to comments such as these. That way they can at least perpetuate the notion that gender-bias in academia shouldn’t be the norm.