- 7 hours ago
Female scientists have been sharing "distractingly sexy" photos of themselves after a feminist website encouraged them to respond to comments by a Nobel laureate.
Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt was roundly criticised when he detailed his thoughts about the "trouble with girls" at a conference of science journalists. "Three things happen when they are in the lab," he said, "you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry."
He said his comments were meant to be "light-hearted, ironic comment", but whatever the intention, it went over like a heavy metallic dirigible in a field with some widely acknowledged gender issues. Hunt has now resigned from his position at University College London.
On Thursday the hashtag #DistractinglySexy began taking off, with more than 10,000 tweets in a matter of hours. The trend was prompted by a shout-out by thefeminist online magazine Vagenda which urged female scientists to share pictures of themselves at work. WARNING: the photos below are not graphic in the slightest.
In most Twitter storms over sexism there's usually a debate of sorts but in this casenearly all of the most popular and repeated tweets mentioning Hunt are critical of his comments.
Blog by Mike Wendling
Next story: The pitched battle over the European Games
The European Games kicks off in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, on Friday. It's the first Olympic-style sporting festival for the continent - but a hashtag first used by organisers and originally meant to celebrate the games has been turned on its head by human rights campaigners. READ MORE
You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us onFacebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.
No comments:
Post a Comment