TOO SEXY FOR THEIR LAB COATS?
‘ LET me tell you about my trouble with girls” is an opening sentence that, when declared in public, rarely ends well — fair or not. And it certainly didn’t for Nobel Prize winning scientist Tim Hunt, who was talking about the challenges of women in labs recently at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea.
He followed up that intro with: “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry!”
The solution, he suggested, was “singlesex labs.”
Predictable outrage ensued— including a response on social media by women scientists that displayed an irresolvable contradiction at the heart of feminist fury.
Hunt now says he was just joking. Several female scientists, including his own wife, Prof. Mary Collins, one of Britain’s top immunologists, have come to his defense.
Nevertheless, he’s been forced to resign a post at the University College of London as well as from the science committee of the European Research Council.
There’s no doubt the first two parts of Hunt’s statement are true.
Just like in every other workplace in America, women and men fall in love. And especially when they are working in close quarters and/ or in very competitive environments like research laboratories, there’s no question romance causes complications for work.
As for whether women cry when you criticize them, well, we do it more often than men anyway.
In the two decades I have spent in offices, I have seen exactly one man cry and I can’t count the number of women I have seen tear up in the workplace.
Yet the reaction on Twitter took a strange turn.
“Here I am again being # distractinglysexy in Level B PPE [ personal protective equipment]. Because who can’t resist a girl with her own supplied air?” That’s what “Geeky Girl Engineer” wrote in a tweet after Hunt’s comments went viral. It was one of thousands of such tweets.
“Gets hot up in here when working on UV calibration in the clean lab. # distractinglysexy How bout them apples # Tim Hunt?” tweeted “Rocket Scientista.” “Nothing like a sample tube full of cheetah poop to make you # distractinglysexy” wrote one wildlife biologist. Then there was “Filthy # archaeology women — so # distractinglysexy while headfirst down a Neolithic grave.”
One wonders, though, about the message at the heart of all of these # distractinglysexy tweets and Facebook posts. The conceit of all of these jabs with women pictured in lab coats or face masks or hazmat suits is that it would be crazy for a man to be distracted by them.
Because, you know, they don’t look hot by traditional measures. But these are presumably the same women who would consider it backward for a man to go after the dumb blond receptionist answering the phone outside the lab. You can’t have it both ways, ladies. The world is filled with smart men who find hardworking, curious, intelligent women sexy — regardless of what they’re wearing. And that’s a good thing. Hunt met his wife while he was directing her studies at Cambridge. And while this was no doubt distracting for both, it doesn’t seem to have harmed the career or the scholarship of either party.
Besides, why wouldn’t a man want to pursue a woman he meets in his lab?
In a survey she commissioned for her book, “Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women,” University of Wisconsin sociologist Christine Whelan found that “71percent of highearning or graduate educated men said a woman’s career or educational success makes her more desirable as a wife, 68 percent report that smart women make better mothers and 90 percent of highachieving men say they want to marry— or are already married to — a woman who is as or more intelligent than they are.”
According to a report from Payscale, a company that collects humanresources data, 15 percent of the 42,000 respondents said they would date a coworker.
And one out of five people who did date a colleague ended up marrying him or her.
No matter how ugly your work clothes are, it turns out that, as Whelan notes, “Gentlemen prefer brains.”