Exactly. I have heard the headmaster of a (progressive, left wing) North London school remark that when he went to Headmasters’ Conference he often felt he was among the barbarians. And I know of a very highly paid North London lawyer (half Indian) who sends his children to the local State primary school despite being easily able to afford a private school education.
Oddly, a lot of the private schools in the UK are now full of foreign pupils, many from Russia or China. But you may be aware that Russians and Chinese do not always have the most enlightened attitude to people from other cultures, especially Muslims.
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She must have developed a tolerance
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High daily dose of Piriton?
Hence, my statement about class and bad parenting. I think non-Brits often forget that Britain is a society with social classes that only recently “went away” (only not).
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High functioning autistics tend to be able to process social interactions, but require doing so with specificity. The problem is that most people deliberately avoid being clear or accurate in their interactions with others. So autistics get blamed for not likewise depending upon guesswork and “body language”, when it is these very things which are decidedly antisocial.
Actually, body language and “guesswork” are the very nature of social interactions. Unspoken cues are part of social interaction in all primates since…most of them don’t have speech and have a limited repertoire of verbal cries.
Social class started to relinquish its hold during the post war years. Working class poor-but-smart people were given access to class-busting education by means of student grants up until the tail end of Thatcher’s era. But now it’s ossifying again. 
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And that’s why they SUCK so hard. What’s so difficult on accepting that not being obscure and communicating more directly is a good idea? Either that, or don’t discriminate against the ones who don’t have the ability to waste so much of cognitive overhead on nonverbal crap.
http://www.cracktwo.com/2015/06/famous-scientists-life-destroyed-after.html
I’d say they are the beginning of social interaction, but they are hardly suitable for everything. I get along well with babies and non-human animals - but they and I are also extremely limited with regards to what we can communicate. There is also a severe schism in so-called mature human interactions, where people’s pretense seems to insist that their formal interactions such as politics, business, and science are what ultimately structures human society - but then they act contrary to this. When some people really can and do have the discipline to put the formal structures in the primary position, they then get punished for doing it, instead of “playing the game” of pretending to.
Cognitive overhead is a significant reason for doing things differently. If one is trying to explain or coordinate something involved and non-obvious to people, it’s much more effective if they can listen and try modelling the ideas in their own mind, instead of spending like 90% of the brainpower using their eyes to analyze what your mouth and eyes look like. These physical cues are often irrelevant to many kinds of interaction.
I think that none of this excuses sexist attitudes, which seem to be taught, rather than devised rationally. But the “unspoken rules” (bad idea!) of sex etc certainly make it more difficult than necessary.
It isn’t obscure to the vast majority of humanity. That’s the issue.
The scientist is a douche. If you are 72 and have a successful career in science including managing other scientists and labs, you’ve learned how to behave in polite society and work with others. Making a sexist joke at the expense of women when speaking in front of a group of women scientists is just stupid and he’s old enough and (one would think) experienced enough to know it. He paid the price for being an idiot and (probably) sexist.
Also, if you know you have difficulty with common human communication (and I would presume a successful 72 scientist professor would know if he did), maybe you shouldn’t be giving speeches in front of people or, at least, making unprepared jokes. I mean, if you know you suck at communication, don’t put yourself in a position where your communication will get you fired.
Anything else is just making excuses for him.
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The Guardian has some thoughts…and a rather more sympathetic portrayal, including by women who have worked with him. Not that it matters, though, the mob has already got its scalp.
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Or he opened his mouth and under stress uncharacteristic rubbish came out. Without knowing him or his track record it’s difficult to say which. But it is incredibly easy to start an internet witch hunt that can have devastating consequences …
It sounds more like he should have got a stiff talking to and made to write an apology, rather than dragging his wife into it as well and putting them both through it.
He’s a scientist. If he has a theory, he should run some experiments, collect hard data and validate it instead of doing the most anti-scientific thing imaginable - using his anecdotal experience to make broad judgements.
That said parts of his theory aren’t necessarily wrong. Considering the size of the homosexual population, all male or all female labs would seem like it would dramatically decrease the chance of anyone in a lab falling in love with their lab mates. He says it is detrimental to science, but that is definitely something that would need to be tested. Does performance fall only when you fall in love with your lab mates or fall in love period? Does it really hurt performance of everyone or just professors?
As for women crying more when you criticize them? Even if that is true (and I would not want to have to be in charge of that experiment), I’m not exactly sure why crying is a bad thing either. Is breaking under pressure without crying better or worse then breaking under pressure with crying? Does crying reduce the chance of breaking?
So may things need answering.
He’s also a human. Last I checked, most of those do illogical, stupid things all the time. He’s an older man who was jet lagged and made a dumb joke, aimed largely at himself. His decades of advocating for and supporting women (as attested to by every single female colleague and student who has spoken about him) are out the window and he is destroyed. Even some of the people who criticized him are now saying this was too harsh.
If a career can be ended so easily, then my advice for scientists is to communicate only in press releases. I truly hope that those applauding this outcome someday get a taste of their own medicine and have their own professional lives destroyed by a dumb remark. I could use the laugh.
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No, see, he had a chance to redeem himself after his stupidly, stupid statement. But he didn’t. He said he was just being “honest”.
So, it was a dumb remark and a tone-deaf not-apology that destroyed his professional life. Caveat emptor.
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“a dumb remark and a tone-deaf not-apology that destroyed his professional life”
No, the remark and tone-deaf apology made him look foolish. It was people like you who destroyed him.
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It is, and hence so many misunderstandings. They just refuse to admit that even to themselves. And not keeping the difficulties of the minority in mind could count as ableism and discrimination.
The scientist, from what I heard, is a pretty decent guy.
I had the experience of working in gender-segregated environment (naturally, working in IT). It is less complicated there, way less. Not only you don’t have the need to make a good impression to somebody who’s a potential mate, which saves a lot of effort and cognitive overhead, you also don’t have to watch how you fail yet again (giving up helps here) and watch how somebody else did not fail and got what you keep being denied (which hurts like a bitch regardless).
If he got hurt a fraction of that, his remarks are a highly understandable sentiment. Just avoid the pain and the associated drain on energy and cognition, and focus at the work, undistracted.
Was it a joke, or a somewhat bitter comment born of lifetime of pain being inflicted to him?
He became a victim of a lynch mob.
Who are you to act as a word police? This is a Nobel Prize winner, and a real Nobel Prize, not that peace or literature or economy knockoff; can you get a fraction of such brilliance in your field?
Which these days is pretty much ANY position. Here, before the Revolution, you had to watch closely what you are saying in order to not attract the wrath of the Party. Now the same came to the West, too. One wrong sentence, and your career is gone. It was called totalitarianism and it was considered wrong.
Oh, how absolutist, categorical, high-horse statement.
I am on his side.
His work has a good chance to be useful for curing cancer. Did any of his recent critics come anywhere close to this level of usefulness/contribution for mankind?
That. But does the lynch mob care? No. He looked from a certain angle like he touched a holy cow - no need to investigate any further, just crucify him for the perceived blasphemy. No need to look at his other work, no need to even look at how he actually treats the coworkers and subordinates. Just a pile-on, fueled by hate and prejudice and self-appointed righteousness.
This may actually help. But then they will be criticized for not being in contact with the public enough.
You cannot win.
That. Would be a fitting fate, worth a shot from the minor-celebrations bottle.
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I don’t think he was making a joke.
I dated someone who did her doctorate in one of the top chemistry labs in the world. The professor who ran the lab believed that if you had a personal life, you weren’t dedicated enough to Science (with a capital S) and therefore should get out of his lab. I think when you get to the upper echelons of science, you start running into people who truly believe being distracted is some kind of moral failing.
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Tim Hunt resigned from an honorary appointment, and I imagine is unlikely to be a speaker at such a conference any time soon. But from everything I can tell, he is still a prominent member of many other organizations and a respected name in biochemistry. If his funding in that field or ability to get his papers on it considered are under threat, nobody has mentioned it.
So to the extent that his “career is over” it is not his career as a scientist, but as a public representative for science. And his remarks at this talk, and subsequently confirming he genuinely thinks women are too emotional to easily collaborate with, really do demonstrate he isn’t a good fit for that kind of position.
I guess this is what passes for mobs scalping and lynching these days, somebody being asked to step down from a job they screwed up? Or is that only when the screw up is insulting the very group his organizations have been trying to encourage, which I guess is somehow not something you think they should care about?
I imagine these are meant as a defense, but they show as a deeply sexist evaluation. Because they presume the kind of generalization that is the essence of sexism, racism, what have you; taking interactions with one individual or another and making it about their presumed group.
Maybe Hunt did get hurt by people he worked with, or as he said ran into problems falling in love or criticizing them until they broke down. This doesn’t excuse him wanting different people out of his lab because they happen to share a chromosome he lacks. And even if it did, he is speaking for organizations trying not to exclude those people, so it would still make him an awful representative.
And by the way, the lack of complication you found in a gender-segregated environment is that you didn’t complicate things yourself. You said as much: the cognitive overhead was trying to impress people because they were “potential mates”. If that wasn’t something you wanted, all you had to do was treat your coworkers the same instead of regarding some as sex targets.
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Already, people are whining 'What about the sexist white men who have no doubt ruined the careers of women? Why don’t you CARE about them?"
Because how people treat women doesn’t matter. But don’t you dare - don’t you DARE - ever attempt to make a white dude feel sorry for being a complete asshole. Literally telling people that women shouldn’t be allowed to work jobs they want? That’s fine. That’s not “shaming” anyone, that’s not going to hurt anyone at all - because, to some dudes, women aren’t ‘anyones’, they’re not people.
But a white dude? Why, anything BAD that happens to him is awful. That’s why we’re going to link to articles about white dudes having their lives inconvenienced that totally dismiss when black women have their lives ruined as unimportant and not mattering.
Also, it’s hilarious how often “witch hunt” is used to apply to men, but never actually to women when they’re attacked or hounded…
Just curious, do you also support the Nobel Prize winners who are blatantly racist, or steal from the work of others?
In the future, can you please preface all your statements with “I, as a person who thinks women should be barred from any work a man doesn’t want them in…” ?
It would make your totalitarian views more easily known.
The sheer obviousness by which people who speak out about “public shaming”, “witch hunts”, or “lynch mobs” really just mean “I want to be protected from saying and doing bigoted things” is super obvious. A man who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to enter the sciences or hold positions is not suited to be a representative or speaker. If you honestly think research would be better off by keeping out half of all humans because they’re women, rather than a minority of all men because they’re sexist assholes, then you should not be allowed in a lab - because you can’t think rationally, very clearly.
Also, can I just point out the irony of his “As soon as you criticize a woman, she starts crying” contrasted to the news article talking about how he was crying? Man insults women, says they cry too easily, suffers predictable results from his remarks, and then oh, he’s sobbing, poor him? If he’s going to cry so easily when criticized, he doesn’t deserve the job, right?
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