Responding to criticism of our coverage of the Tim Hunt affair
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Version 0 of 1. Guardian coverage of remarks by Sir Tim Hunt, the Nobel prize winner, to a group of women scientists about his “trouble with girls”, has been criticised by some readers. An editorial was one area of readers’ concerns. It was published three weeks after he made the remarks to a world conference of science journalists in South Korea that eventually led to his resignation from his honorary post at University College London. Prof Hunt said at that conference: “Three things happen when [women] are in the lab … you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.” The editorial, published on 1 July, begins: “It is three weeks since Sir Tim Hunt, a Nobel prize winner, shared his sexist opinion of female scientists – distractingly sexy, prone to weep when criticised and best segregated at work – with a room full of science writers … Within 24 hours of his after-dinner speech, he had gone … This bitter mix of resentments amplified by the polarising environment of social media should have met a calmer official response. But the professor still had to go.” One reader wrote: “Can I beg you to examine whether the second editorial yesterday fell seriously below the standards we used to expect from the Guardian? … The leader was so tendentious it was unbelievable. For your editorial to say that one possibly misjudged joke ‘comprehensively undermined his reputation as a leading supporter of female scientists’ is simply silly. It ought to have been treated with more nuance and less easy repetition of prejudice and sloppy thought.” One reader, who makes clear that he has known and worked with Prof Hunt, wrote: “A measured response is required. Regrettably, however, your own response [the editorial] is not measured.” The aim of this column is to address the issues about coverage, not to express an opinion about Prof Hunt’s remarks. The problems with coverage came before the editorial was published, in an opinion piece by Connie St Louis, the senior science journalism lecturer who tweeted Prof Hunt’s remarks, igniting the controversy. She was responding in an online article published on 23 June to a number of leading scientists who had publicly defended Prof Hunt. However, an unedited version of her article was published in error, which was immediately spotted by readers. “Was it even subbed? It’s hard to believe the Guardian published it in its current form.” Unfortunately we did but then edited it live, when the mistake was discovered. If basic style and grammar errors are spotted and corrected within hours of a piece being published, we would not usually add a footnote. However, on this occasion we should have done so as, such is the controversy surrounding the story, at least one commentator thought the absence of a footnote might be significant. It wasn’t. Moving on to the editorial there were two objective factual errors in it. The editorial incorrectly referred to “the pre-social-media era dumping” of Robin Cook. It also claimed that Alastair Campbell telephoned the Labour foreign secretary at the airport, calling on him “to choose between his job and his lover”, an allegation denied by Campbell in a letter to the Guardian. Cook was not dumped over his affair but resigned several years later over the Iraq war. The second error in the editorial is, as suggested above, that the offending remarks by Prof Hunt were not made at an after-dinner speech but during a pre-lunch toast. I am not sure this counts as a substantial inaccuracy but an after-dinner speech does gives the impression of something prepared beforehand, that was more thoughtful and considered, rather than an off-the-cuff joke now publicly regretted by Prof Hunt as being thoughtless. However, even these judgments may be seen as value-laden. An alternative view may be that it merely reveals what lurks in the unconscious. Editorials are there to express the views of the newspaper, an opinion, but it should be a collective opinion. In that context I think it would have been reasonable to describe Prof Hunt as making a sexist remark – he admits it was wrong, even if it was meant to be ironic. But it is a stretch to say that he “shared his sexist opinion of female scientists”. Is it right to infer a man’s whole character from one remark? Where the Guardian had it right is in the heart of the leader, in the penultimate paragraph: “All the same, the surge of support shows how widely misunderstood the pressing need for feminist activism still is, particularly in science. According to the latest evidence, women occupy just 12% of jobs in science, technology and engineering. In research, women earn less, are less likely to be promoted, and win fewer awards to support their work. A third of PhD students are women, but only one in 10 professors. This is not a joking matter (although the #distractinglysexy hashtag did a good job of showing there could be a funny side).” |