Foolish daring is not bravery, and honest confessions have always been a fast road to punishment. And sometimes that’s as it should be. Sure, it would have been better if the things implied here, which sound a lot like Hunt saying he was unprofessional to women he worked with, could have been dealt with at the time.
That doesn’t mean a key speaker at a lunch about women in science telling them their kind doesn’t belong working with him doesn’t deserve our objection. Honesty in disrespecting the scientists you are supposed to be representing still leaves you a total failure as a representative. This wasn’t thoughtcrime, this was abusing someone else’s platform.
But he wasn’t being “honest”. Honesty would be him professing at the conference, “I find it difficult to work with women as I find them distracting and I treat them poorly to boot.”
He couldn’t honestly say he knowingly treats women poorly and not be some sort of monster.
That’s the problem when you come up against your own biases, you sound like a retard but you don’t know why.
It is his lived experience mis-stated by himself as a result of his own shortcomings.
All of his statements boil down to “I’m incapable of working as effectively as I believe I am able because/if women are present.”
Perfectly natural, except his preferred antidote is to blame the women and segregate them, according to what he says.
Effectively blaming women isn’t cool even if you’re just stating (poorly) natural, honest things like “Men & women working together in close quarters have complex social interactions.”
So I got that by challenging his expression of his lived experience by comparing it with my own.
When I was in graduate school back in the 1980’s, one of my professors expressed the opinion that women don’t belong in physics. He at least had the colorable excuse of being a southern septuagenarian. We just advised all the female students to not take classes from him or try to do a thesis with him. He was kind of a dimwit anyway. But that was 30 years ago and the world has moved on.
Simon (not Sasha) Baron Cohen, a psychologist, once gave personality inventories to a wide array of scientists and showed that the closer you get to physics and mathematics (and chemistry is pretty close), the more likely the scientist is to resemble a high functioning autistic. That includes limited ability to process social interactions.
