Source: BBC Radio 4
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rx8jl
Date: 14/12/2015
Event: 2015 Hashtags of the Year: #DistractinglySexy
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
Mukul Devichand: Welcome to 2015 Hashtags of the Year. Today - #DistractinglySexy, a hashtag to protest against sexism in science. But, as we'll hear, there's been a very personal fallout from it, with two lives - a leading British scientist and the journalist who first tweeted his seemingly sexist remarks - deeply affected.
Connie St. Louis: I was trolled, I had death threats... It was shocking.
Professor Mary Collins: The fallout from that... incident has been really extraordinary.
Woman's voice: It's a shame that he will be remembered for this and not for his work.
Mukul Devichand: I'm Mukul Devichand, and one thing I see happening a lot, while reporting the internet for BBC Trending, is acrimony, even nastiness, overshadowing the big online debates. The story I'm telling today all began with 39 words uttered by Sir Tim Hunt, the biochemist who discovered cyclins, the proteins which help regulate cell growth, a discovery which earned him the Nobel Prize. On the 8th of June he was in South Korea, giving a toast to female engineers and scientists. "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls", he said. "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".
Connie St. Louis: At the beginning, I think he thought he was being funny.
Mukul Devichand: The wider world first heard these words in a tweet by British science journalist and journalism professor at City University Connie St. Louis, who was in the room.
Connie St. Louis: I am thinking "Why are you saying those things? They're ridiculous. They're very Victorian." Whether or not he says he's joking, it wasn't funny. Just felt: I don't know how we respond to this. This is awful!
Mukul Devichand: Before long, Tim Hunt's name began to trend, world-wide.
Connie St. Louis: This tweet was gathering momentum, and I remember going back to my room and thinking "I don't want to shame this man. The key thing here is: this is about sexism in science, it's not about Tim Hunt. What can I do to personally turn this thing away?" I now know that it's absolutely impossible to do that, because once a tweet gets retweeted, people lose where it's come from.
Mukul Devichand: She says she tried to deflect attention from the man, by sending three other tweets directed at scientific organisations, about things like guidelines for speakers. But they went largely unnoticed. Meanwhile, Tim Hunt himself was also becoming aware of the Twitterstorm brewing around him. As he later told his wife, also a leading scientist, the immunologist Professor Mary Collins, who read us a statement.
Professor Mary Collins: It was being very odd. Tim made what he thought was a self-deprecating joke. He stayed at this conference for another day and a half. One person mentioned it by chance, but nobody said they were offended by it. In the departure lounge, he realised he was suddenly in deep trouble, because he was emailed an article to be published in the next day's Times, which was based on a tweet.
Mukul Devichand: The email had been sent by a BBC producer working for the Today programme, who caught him before he boarded a plane and pre-recorded an interview.
Sir Tim Hunt: I did mean the part about having - having trouble with girls. I mean, it is true that people - I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science... I mean, I'm really, really sorry that I caused any offence - that's awful. I certainly didn't mean - I just meant to be honest, actually.
Mukul Devichand: His wife, Professor Mary Collins, a self-described feminist, said in her statement that his poor clarification, in that interview, made things worse.
Professor Mary Collins: He recorded a really rambling, unclear statement, sounding like he actually recommended single-sex laboratories. And that's nonsense, for those of us who know him and the people - men and women - who have worked with him, over the years. And the fallout from that programme, and the whole incident, has been really extraordinary.
Mukul Devichand: Tim Hunt then offered a heartfelt apology to the conference organisers, and publicly. But it wasn't quite enough. He didn't have a paid job to be fired from but while on the plane home, he was asked to resign from his honorary position at University College London. Resignations from the European Research Council and the Royal Society followed. And that might have been that. but it wasn't. Because social media made Tim Hunt's words into a symbol.
Woman's voice: I fell in love with a micro-centrifuge. Typical woman in a lab.
Mukul Devichand: This tweet was accompanied by an image of a female scientist, one of thousands around the world who began uploading pictures of themselves. Remember - Tim Hunt had said that his trouble with women in labs was that you fall in love with them and when you criticise them, they cry. The response was a phrase: "distractingly sexy".
Woman's voice: Managed to hold back the tears long enough to run a DNA gel... Thankfully, worker bees are all female, otherwise...
Mukul Devichand: This was the kind of moment when a guy like me, as editor of BBC Trending, is always watching for. There's a hugely important subtext - sexism in science, with women occupying just 12% of jobs in science, technology and engineering, and earning less for it than men. And there's a creative, fun protest catching fire online, drawing thousands into the conversation. Rhiannon Cosslett, the co-founder of the feminist Vagenda blog, started that hashtag, which was inspired by Tim Hunt's original comments.
Rhiannon Cosslett: I suppose they were just kind of quite dinosaur-ish, weren't they, and there was something quite funny about that. But this campaign was absolutely not to do with targetting Sir Tim Hunt, and in fact it was about shifting the conversation to make it something positive about women in science. And I think we achieved that.
Mukul Devichand: For several days, female scientists around the world uploaded pictures to Instagram and Twitter of themselves looking anything but "distractingly sexy", in their lab coats.
Woman's voice: The picture is of me with a UV mask on and in my lab coat in the room where we use UV light to cut DNA out of gels.
Mukul Devichand: This is one of the female scientists who took part in the hashtag.
Woman's voice: There is so much of that low-lying undermining of women, and it goes on all the time and quite a lot of us thought "Well, actually this is a problem, I'm not going to ignore this".
Mukul Devichand: Remember - by now, Tim Hunt had already resigned several roles. So the campaign wasn't targetted at him. His wife told us he never even saw it, because he doesn't go on Twitter. But it did have the effect of making his words into an enduring symbol of sexism in science.
Woman's voice: I've no beef with him. I think it is a shame that he will be remembered for this and not for his work, because he was undoubtedly an unbelievable scientist, and I think it was more the point that this was going to happen at some point. It was inevitable. And it's just a shame that it happened to be him.
Mukul Devichand: In the end, nearly 200,000 #DistractinglySexy messages were posted. The journal Nature recently looked into what effect it all had, concluding that it's not yet clear whether it created a lasting or discernible change in scientific workplaces, but that it did provide a sense of solidarity and empowerment to many women in science. And that could have been that - except that, for all those looking at the macro issues here, like Tim Hunt's career or sexism in science, a new micro-level surge was also starting. And it's one I've seen a lot on social media, in which everything is personal and everyone is fair game. Rhiannon Cosslett, who started the #DistractinglySexy hashtag.
Rhiannon Cosslett: I was getting lots of kind of nasty, misogynistic, sexist, abusive tweets. I was not responsible for his resignation, and yet I was being framed that way. It did mean that a lot of internet misogynists latched onto this discussion, kind of used it as an excuse to abuse women.
Mukul Devichand: As is depressingly common on the internet, misogyny and racism was in particular evidence. Connie St. Louis, who is black, was targetted by a seeming army of online trolls.
Connie St. Louis: I was trolled, I had death threats, people would send pictures of me as a monkey swinging through a tree next to a mud hut, saying "Please go back home, we don't need your kind here". It was shocking, and well, I just had to stop reading it, because it was awful.
Mukul Devichand: It actually got nasty on all sides, including those out to abuse Tim Hunt and his wife. But away from all the trolling, there were also many, in British science and online, who felt that Tim Hunt was in a sense a victim, for his 39 ill-judged words.
Man's voice: Is this the kind of Britain we want to live in, when neurotic online witch hunts demand cruel public punishment being inflicted on erudite elderly scientists?
Mukul Devichand: This comes from an online petition to defend Tim Hunt, signed by over 2,000 people. A group of leading scientists also spoke out against the lynch mob. Connie St. Louis saw her professional credibility now being examined and re-examined, and with it, the accuracy of her reporting questioned, with new evidence emerging online, from people who were also at the conference in Seoul. Some of it supported her description, but others clashed with it. For the renowned neurobiologist Sir Colin Blakemore, this new evidence made it clear that the context of Tim Hunt's original 39 words hadn't been accurately conveyed. And he made a bold symbolic gesture to back Sir Tim Hunt, by resigning from a role he had, at the Association of British Science Writers, who he felt appeared to be endorsing Connie St. Louis's story.
Sir Colin Blakemore: Well, you know, good reporting doesn't just describe words that were said, it describes the context, it gives the right of reply, and so you can judge whether a statement, for instance, was intended as a joke or not, whether it was accompanied by very positive statements about women scientists - which apparently it was - that seems to be the majority view, now. I just became increasingly disturbed about that, not least because of the evidence that then emerged from all the young people who had worked in his lab and all of his collaborators, male and female, about the nature of the man himself - looks as though he's a really decent bloke. And so one has to distinguish the man and the word.
Mukul Devichand: But is there a risk that this is shooting the messenger?
Sir Colin Blakemore: I don't think that Connie St. Louis has been treated entirely fairly. She should also, I think, be capable of recognising that there was some inaccuracies in it, as new evidence has emerged. I mean, a few apologies all round, actually, would have - could have helped enormously.
Mukul Devichand: Apology should also come, he says, from the various scientific organisations who accepted Tim Hunt's resignation, in his opinion too hastily. Those organisations told us they stand by their decisions. And so does Connie St. Louis.
Connie St. Louis: Would I report the same story, in another circumstance? And the answer's got to be yes - what I did was good journalism.
Mukul Devichand: In this final phase of the social media trend, the "he said" "she said" has overshadowed the debate about the bigger issues. Would all this acrimony be worth it, if those 200,000 messages posted under the #DistractinglySexy tag did somehow make a lasting change in attitudes over sexism in science? Will they? Sir Colin Blakemore and Connie St. Louis actually agree on this one. In their view, certainly not enough.
Sir Colin Blakemore: Such a fierce reaction as this should actually have stimulated a constructive discussion - there could in the end be good things. At the moment, I'm really shocked by how little resolution there has been.
Connie St. Louis: #DistractinglySexy achieved nothing, apart from showing a lot of women have a great sense of humour, and we kind of knew that before, but I think they lost an opportunity. They could have been funny and political.