Tim Hunt isn’t too old to learn that his views of women are out of step with the modern world
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“You’re a sexist!” “No,
you’re
a sexist!” The argument was loud enough to carry up a flight of stairs, and reluctantly I went to see what was going on. Emotions were running too high to ascertain exactly what had started it – something to do with football, possibly – but one thing was clear: playground insults have changed since my day. The gaggle of eight-year-old boys in our kitchen had absolutely no idea what a sexist actually is, but they’d certainly grasped that nobody wants to be called one.
As,
somewhat more belatedly, has Sir Tim Hunt. The Nobel-winning biochemist has been widely lampooned for suggesting that women are a nuisance in the lab because “you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry”, which is apparently bad for science. He was duly
put in the stocks of the Today programme, and sharply criticised by fellow scientists. And – one imagines – endured some sticky moments at the breakfast table, given his wife is an eminent professor of immunology. (Yes, they met and fell in love in a lab; miraculously, science has survived this.)
Even if Hunt was joking when he suggested labs should be single-sex – keeping all those minxy lady biochemists in their provocatively buttoned-up white coats safely out of sight – it was self-evidently the wrong joke to make to an audience of female scientists and science writers. Not the behaviour expected of an honorary professor at University College London, which is proud of being the first university in Britain to admit women on equal terms to men. So why, then, does it feel slightly disconcerting that within a day of his remarks being reported, Hunt was out of a job?
I don’t buy the hysterical, foam-flecked rubbish about him being bullied out by feminazis. Although
UCL’s brusque statement
on Hunt’s departure suggests his resignation may well have been the outcome it wanted, that hardly adds up to men everywhere being silenced by the thought police. Nor is it conclusive proof that, as the comedian Jerry Seinfeld recently complained, political correctness is killing jokes (more specifically, his jokes, including a gag involving the words “gay French king”).
Scientists, of all people, shouldn’t be surprised to be robustly challenged for extrapolating wildly from a few ropey old anecdotes. And anyone in teaching should recognise the dangers of even joking about female students potentially not being up to it, especially in the week that research (irony of ironies, from UCL) showed teachers are less likely to judge girls good at maths even when they score as well as boys. As for 61-year-old comedians who find the laughs drying up – well, maybe it’s time to try updating the material, instead of moaning that kids today don’t know what’s funny.
So no, I don’t think Hunt is a great man wronged: highly intelligent people are not immune to saying stupid things. But what bothers me is that intelligent people are also hopefully capable of recognising when they’re wrong, changing their minds accordingly, and discussing it openly in a way that helps others recognise where they might be wrong too. And absolutely none of that is achieved by forcing a symbolic resignation.
There are so many Hunts, that’s the problem. Educated, rational and otherwise agreeable men (and indeed sometimes women) of a certain age and background who beneath the surface hold surprisingly weird ideas about women, or gay people, or black people, or anyone else they didn’t come across much while growing up.
As judges, they’re the sort who tend to portray 14-year-old victims of abusive relationships as little temptresses; as police officers, the sort who don’t take domestic violence as seriously as they should. They’re the politicians forever being forced to apologise for saying something that privately they don’t really regret; and as employers they’re the stuff of working women’s nightmares, with their unshakeable belief that all females under 40 are just waiting to get pregnant and give it all up for the baby.
But what they’re not necessarily is hate-filled misogynists, or hopelessly beyond rehabilitation: just people who don’t seem to have noticed that the world has moved on a bit. So what, exactly, should we do with them?
Ageing sexists whose personal prejudices interfere with their ability to do the job obviously have to be tackled. Getting to grips with the basic principles of equality should be as non-negotiable as – and frankly not much more complicated than – mastering the new office IT system, or keeping up with developments in your professional field. But the first step should be retraining, not issuing a P45; and above all, it needs to be clear that failure to get the hang of this stuff makes you sound not just sexist but frankly past it; ridiculous not just to women but to younger men, too.
For the gap Tim Hunt has fallen down is arguably as much generational as gendered. The 72-year-old professor was educated at Magdalen School followed by Clare College Cambridge, neither of which admitted girls at the time. You can see why encountering these exotic creatures at work might have come as a shock to his generation.
But their sons, raised in different times, are more likely to have learned to share an office with women without the sky falling in. And their grandsons are being raised in a complex world that sometimes looks more segregated than ever – all pink Lego for girls and blue for boys – but feels infinitely more fluid: my son has grown up with girls on his football and cricket teams, girls in science club, girls in Beavers and Cubs (which they join because it’s apparently more exciting than Brownies). Little boys are as scornful about little girls as ever, but they’re a lot more used to them; more comfortable with the idea that they sometimes do stuff differently and sometimes don’t, and you just have to work around it.
Seinfeld was right to argue that “sexist” isn’t a word to be used lightly, and certainly not used to shut down legitimate debate. It carries too heavy a weight for that. But as the idea of men and women being roughly equal becomes ever more mainstream, and its dwindling band of opponents ever more shrill and eccentric – well, maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised if future generations start using “sexist” interchangeably with “loser”. For that’s what, with any luck, it will have come to mean.
- This article was amended on Thursday 11 June 2015 to correct Jerry Seinfeld’s name.
