Nobel prize winner Sir Tim Hunt is currently in hot water after making controversial remarks about women working in the field of science. Professor Richard Dawkins expressed his thoughts about the issue and said that Hunt was a subject of "witch hunt" and "feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness."
Hunt, 72, took social media on a whirlwind after he attended a conference in South Korea, and said these words: "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry."
The evolutionary biologist was quick to insist that his words were meant to be taken in a jocular light and that he did not intend to offend.
However, as Hunt was on his way back to London, he tendered his resignation at the University College London, where he worked as an honorary professor. Mary Collins, wife of Hunt and also affiliated with the university, said her husband had no choice because a senior authority at the UCL had called up to instruct Hunt to resign or be expelled.
Richard Dawkins, a University of Oxford evolutionary biologist and writer, said the public anger and shenanigans enveloping Hunt's case are "disproportionate."
While Hunt's remarks didn't exactly please Dawkins, for him, forcing the Nobel prize winner out of his stint at the university is an action made by people acting morally superior in academia. "Along with many others, I didn't like Sir Tim Hunt's joke, but 'disproportionate' would be a huge underestimate of the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness," he wrote in his letter to The Times.
Many citizens voiced their resentment of Hunt's statement and regarded it as a sexist comment. For them such words are not beneficial to the scientific sector where women are constantly trying to fit it and be taken seriously.
Still, other people took Hunt's side. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is asking that Hunt should be reinstated at the university.
And physicist Brian Cox commented on the BBC Radio 4's The World at One that, through Hunt's statement, a highly critical issue was highlighted in relation to the perceived culture of sexism in the environment of the professional sciences. However, he believes that Hunt's comments were "ill-advised," and that he should have been treated opposite to what happened.
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