Comments by Nobel laureate and biochemist Tim Hunt were met with a natural tidal wave – or maybe more a tsunami – of backlash when he claimed women scientists were more likely to cry in work than their male counterparts when criticised.
Cry-baby wemminz around the world banded together in the #distractinglysexy hashtag, which you can see here, showing themselves and other successful female scientists hard at work, to rail against the chauvinist idea that women can’t work alongside men in the labs.
And now, the source of all that is evil and misogynistic has also proved to be the antidote: *science*.
Speaking to the Guardian, Professor Ad Vingerhoets has explained that his comprehensive study on crying in work found that men were more likely to have a good bawl. This disproves the sexist remarks made by Hunt… :’( uh oh Tim.
He claimed that his prior work had suggested women cry more than men at work, but when put to the test in a live analysis, the opposite was proved.
Vingerhoets said: “Three years ago we completed a survey about crying among psychotherapists. In that study, we found that male therapists seem to cry more often than their female counterparts.”
Analysis found that as many as 87.4 per cent of the therapists involved in the research admitted to crying at least once in the workplace, with a higher male majority.
This is despite Boris Johnson’s claims in the Telegraph that Vingerhoet’s study actually proved women cried more as a “scientific fact”.
The blond-haired knight came to the defence of Tim Hunt, who resigned from his post at the Royal Society and University College London last week.
Either way, reducing women or men to their feelings rather than their ability is never good, and we should all be permitted to shed a tear when things get tough sometimes without losing respect.
