20150616_W1

Source: BBC Radio 4: World at One

URL: N/A

Date: 16/06/2015

Event: Brian Cox: hounding of Sir Tim Hunt was "wrong and disproportionate"

Credit: BBC Radio 4

People:

• Professor Brian Cox: Particle physicist and professor at the University of Manchester
• Martha Kearney: BBC Radio 4 presenter

Martha Kearney: The World at One, this is Martha Kearney with 45 minutes of news and comment... The scientist and broadcaster Brian Cox tells us that Sir Tim Hunt's remarks about women in laboratories were "ill-advised" but that he shouldn't have been hounded out of office.

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Martha Kearney: Should the Nobel laureate scientist Sir Tim Hunt have had to resign from his roles at the Royal Society and University College London? He faced wide-ranging criticism after describing himself as a "chauvinist pig" and then going on to say "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they're in the lab - you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry". Now the scientist and broadcaster Brian Cox, who's Professor for Public Engagement in Science, has told this programme that he doesn't think Sir Tim Hunt should have been hounded out. But he began by acknowledging the challenges both science and engineering face.

Brian Cox: The first thing to say is that there is a problem in science and engineering, and the problem is that we don't have enough women going into certain areas, in particular engineering, whilst we have a huge shortage - we need a million more engineers in the economy by 2020. And so we're not going to make that - and that's a very serious economic issue. So, what - the first thing to do, the sensible thing is to look at where - which groups of society are under-represented and it's women, in the case of engineering.

Secondly, there's an interesting statistic, a startling statistic and worrying, which is that in America and Europe, around 50% of Ph.Ds are women, so that's good, but if you look at senior positions in universities and on committees, about a fifth are occupied by women. So trying to address that is a sensible thing to do.

Martha Kearney: So where does Sir Tim Hunt's remarks fit into all of that?

Brian Cox: Those that know him - and I don't know him, personally - say that he's, he's obviously a brilliant scientist, a Nobel Prize winner, and a nice, a nice man as well - he's not one of these people who's got some hinterland of people coming out of the woodwork to say "Yes, he's just terrible". So he made very ill-advised comments. Some people say that "There you are, so it's not surprising, he's in his mid-70s, so without being ageist about it, the fact that he's slightly unreconstructed is perhaps not surprising". So that's one angle.

But the other angle, of course, is that we have a problem, and so you can make the argument that senior figures in science have to be, first of all, aware that there's a central problem with women progressing up to the highest levels of science, and secondly, therefore, have to be mindful of that and be careful of their language.

On the other side, of course, there's the wider problem of trial by social media. People do make ill-advised comments, from time to time, and so is it appropriate, is it appropriate to hound someone out of their position at a university, or indeed is it appropriate for the university to react in the way that UCL in this case did, and ask someone to resign or else threaten to sack them?

Martha Kearney: And what's your view about that - should he have been forced to resign?

Brian Cox: I don't think so, is my personal view, with the caveat that I think it is serious. So it is - one of the things that prevents women going into science and engineering is this perceived, um, air of sexism that undoubtedly was there, as it was in all parts of society in the 60s and 70s, and perhaps 80s and even to this day. But then, you know, on the other side, I wonder whether "Man in his 70s makes Sexist Remark" is a headline in itself. So we do have a problem about these, kind of, mobs - you call them Twittermobs, exactly what they are - descending on people who use language ill-advisedly, and cause great professional ruin. I don't think that's the case, although he felt that - he gave an interview in the Observer where he said he felt he had been ruined, To have a Nobel Prize winner, and by all accounts a very - a great scientist and a good person, being hounded out of a position at UCL, after all those years of good work in science, I think is a - I think that's wrong and disproportionate, with the caveats I mentioned.

Martha Kearney: So what should be done about the larger issue that you've addressed? You said there was sexism in the past but possibly even today.

Brian Cox: Well, there must be, because the figures bear that out. So there's - there are problems about getting, as I said, girls into engineering and physical sciences, in the first place, and then there are big problems with career progression. And there are many solutions to this, there isn't one magic bullet - if it was easy, it would have been done. So I think there is a question about language, a question about culture, there's a question about career structure - it's difficult to get a Ph.D and going into a postdoc and publishing papers, and so, if you like, a career break - let's say you want to have children - the usual things that prevent women from progressing are all present in science. And so the issue must be taken seriously.

Martha Kearney: Brian Cox.