Are we done with Tim Hunt now?

Probably not, if you’re one of those people whose response to the Tim Hunt situation is to see conspiracies and witch hunts and a desire to destroy a scientist’s career. But the truth is that critics of Hunt have not been baying for anyone’s blood, but have been saying that sexist jokes at a women’s science meeting speak to a kind of arrogance that is not appropriate for an ambassador for equality. University College London has released a plain-spoken statement, confirming that the council unanimously found his comments entirely inappropriate for an honorary professor, and they have affirmed that his position is retracted.

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Save the retconning for comic books

The push-back against equality is now trying to rewrite history and retroactively rehabilitate Bora Zivkovic. In a terrible article that ignores all the facts and instead throws around sexist terms (“witch hunt”, “bitches”, “pussies”, “harpies”) utterly oblivious to the fact that they undermine her own argument, we get this ignorant bullshit.

As I noted above, what Bora did in no way met any legal or reasonable standard for sexual harassment — a crew of harpies who accused him just said it did; and all these supposed “skeptics” who make up the science-writing community just piled on.

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Milo Yiannopoulos is just the worst

He’s at it again, as Phil Plait notes in a post that says all the smart things.

And now another attack piece on St. Louis has been posted on the far-right-wing Breitbart site, saying she has become immune from criticism because she’s black.

Yes, you read that right. And that’s not all. In a sentence so tone deaf I’d swear it’s parody, the author, Milo Yiannopoulos, writes*:

St Louis is responsible for the sacking of Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize-winning biochemist who became the target of an online lynch mob after his comments about women in science were taken out of context.

Yes, again, you read that right. You might ignore the obviously incorrect statements in that one sentence (Hunt wasn’t sacked, he was asked to resign from an honorary position; and as we’ve seen his comments were not taken out of context), but it’s much harder to ignore that, in an article attacking a woman because she’s black, Yiannopoulos used the phrase “lynch mob.”

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What does the chair of the Diversity Committee at the Royal Society have to say about Tim Hunt?

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.

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Bristol Palin, pregnant again

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.

The hopeless arrogance of Milo Yiannopoulos

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.

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That poor wee man!

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.

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I thought they didn’t like hyperbole?

Tim Hunt's very bad day

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.

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