Early last week we saw we saw Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize winner, make some rather sexist comments. He put forward the idea that men and women should work in separate laboratories because (I wish I was making this up) ““Three things happen when they [women] are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry.”
This didn’t exactly sit well with women in science and quite rightly so. Not only did this cause women to take to social media, kicking off the hilarious DistractinglySexy hashtag, posting photos of themselves in the lab (tear free), but it also goes to show that we’ve got a little further to go before women in science become “the norm”
STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are still a predominantly pursued by males. While the number of women in these jobs is on the rise, it’s still only 13% of the positions that are filled by women. At their core, STEM positions are still perceived as a “boys club” and it might be for that reason we don’t see women perusing careers there.
There’s huge amounts of outside influence that get us as the public thinking this way. Aside from the traditional “gender roles” we have to battle against, something as seemingly harmless as a comedy show like “The Big Bang Theory” perpetuates public opinion as science being for nerdy guys while girl the girl next door is pretty, but just doesn’t quite get the clever stuff. (Yes, I know they’ve got female scientists in there now but it took them 4 seasons before one of them became a main stay). That’s over simplifying the issue, but you can see how easy it is to keep these ideas going.
It might have been a Nobel Prize winner making an ill-advised comment that got the attention, but it’s the under-lying issue that’s the problem. Women in the work-place aren’t walking, talking emotional-overreactions, they’re every bit as credible as a man doing the work. We need to strive to make our work-places more woman friendly and less segregated. We need to do more to engage younger girls into perusing STEM careers and to going further in the career path they’ve chosen instead of leaving it up to the men. One of the ways we can do this is by making flexible working more common place which makes many work-places more accessible to women.
This is going to sound strange, but I almost look forward to influential people making comments such as these. Not because I enjoy people making fools of themselves, but the way that people come together to prove that these outdated thoughts are no longer acceptable is becoming ever more creative. Social media can be awful at times, especially when it turns into a mob brandishing pitchforks and torches, and the last thing I want to see is someone lose their job over a misguided comment, however, I think this time it’s different. This time men and women came together to laugh at the fact that these thoughts still circulate.
Social media is a fantastic gauge of how young people’s opinions are changing. We’ve still got a lot of things to fix and a way to go before everything is where it needs to be, but it’s times like this that give me faith that we’ll get there.
