(Re)Framing Tim Hunt

The ongoing vilification of Tim Hunt is a sad sign of the state of our sciences, our politics, and our public discourse about them. By "ongoing vilification" I mean the way in which he is confidently presented as an example of the problem of sexism in science. The most notable recent examples are Sarah Zhang's "A New Twist in the Fight Against Sexism in Science" in Wired and Mark Strauss's "Nobel Laureates Who Were Not Always Noble" in National Geographic. In both pieces, Tim Hunt is presented as part of the problem—in the latter in very strong terms, taking his place in a "rogues' gallery" of "racists, frauds, and misogynists". As far as I can tell, however, even those who support this basic narrative online (people like Dan Waddell and Paula Higgins) don't really claim to have any evidence that he's a sexist. Some say it doesn't even matter whether or not he's a sexist, only that he "said something sexist". This is strange to me, and, like I say, saddening.

To see what I mean, imagine that Tim Hunt's remarks had been misconstrued, not as an expression of sexist views (that he doesn't hold), but as an admission of sexual misconduct (that he doesn't, of course, engage in). Suppose the story had been, "Nobel Laureate admits trying to seduce women in his lab and, when they refuse his advances, verbally abusing them until they break down in tears." Suppose it was this sort of thing that was being said in Wired (where he was in fact paired with Geoff Marcy) and National Geographic. (Writing in the LATimes Robin Abcarian suggests shooting Hunt into space locked in a capsule with Marcy.) I would hope that everyone who's been writing about this, on both sides, would agree that such a characterization, and such a legacy, would be unfair to Hunt.

To defend Hunt from such an accusation would not be tantamount to trivializing the problem of sexual harassment, it would be the simple pursuit of justice for a falsely accused man. Tim Hunt, after all, has never actually been accused by anyone of sexual harassing them. If he had we can be pretty sure that it would have come out by now. But what those who use his name to stand for "casual sexism" forget is that he has also never been accused of sexual discrimination or even of casual sexism before or since his toast to women scientists in Seoul. Just as no women have come forward to tell stories about how he came on to them inappropriately in a lab or how his brutal criticism (born, let's say, of his disprized love) made them cry, no woman has ever suggested that he passed her over for promotion because she was female, or that he treated the men in his labs with greater respect than her. In other words, the image of Tim Hunt as even a casual sexist is as unrelated to reality as the image of him as a sexual harasser.

And yet, because of a three-minute improvised toast in (as Waddell and Higgins have taken great pains to tell us) a half-listening room, he has been made into a symbol of something that, his record shows, he is actually the very opposite of. The reason for this was a sloppily composed tweet by a journalist who was in an important sense (as a member of the WFSJ board) his host, and who herself said she wasn't listening carefully (only realizing when she thought he said something offensive that he was also notable enough to make for a sensational news story), published three hours after his words were spoken. Subsequent research exonerates him of all charges of actually harboring sexist views, and reveals only that he may be a bit too optimistic (for some tastes) about the current state of gender equality in the sciences.

Whatever you may think about what he is said to have said, if you think Tim Hunt is a casual sexist and therefore got what he deserved, you're wrong. And you're wrong in exactly the same sense that you'd be wrong if he really was a casual sexist but was being presented in the science press as a sexual harasser like Geoff Marcy. However wrong what he stands accused of may be, what is being said about him is just plain false.

How can such a grave injustice be done? A recent piece in Nature, which, unfortunately, also propagates the myth of Tim Hunt as a "sexist", provides an explanation. “People who don’t have power really can have their voices heard,” it quotes Northeastern communications researcher Brooke Foucault Welles as saying. “They can reframe the story.”

That is, what we now call "the power of social media" is really the power to use any event and any personality as a focus point around which to "reframe" a narrative that, one believes, isn't getting enough attention. If you want to bring attention to sexism in science, for example, just accuse a scientist of being a sexist, and then celebrate the "support" that his "victims" are getting every time he is called a "misogynist" (see David Calquhoun's tweets) or, my personal favorite, a "rat fucking bastard". Also make sure to emphasize the abusive trolls that predictably attack your accusations with vitriol, while ignoring principled defenses that try to assess the evidence.

In fact, what you do is to construe any defense as illegitimate, by equating the claim that the accused isn't actually a sexist with an expression of sexism itself. It's absurd, of course. This not only harms the reputation of the accused, who in this case happens to be a great supporter of women in science, it is an affront to all the real women that have in fact been victimized by manifest bastards who actually hate women. The ability of these women to tell their stories is significantly diminished by the sloppy journalism and slapdash activism that (re)framed Tim Hunt as a "sexist scientist".