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#DistractinglySexy Trends in Response to Nobel Scientist’s Sexist Remarks

2 minute read
By Olivia B. Waxman

On Wednesday, Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt resigned from his position as honorary professor at University College London after telling a conference in South Korea that it’s distracting to work alongside “girls” in laboratories because “they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.”

Since then, the hashtag #distractinglysexy has been trending on social media, as women have been posting photos of the unglamorous life of a research scientist to ridicule the embattled biochemist, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for research on how cells divide.

I was so #distractinglysexy when collecting cheetah crap that even I lost track of what I was doing and dropped some. pic.twitter.com/3qDS7Hd9aG

— Anne Hilborn (@AnneWHilborn) June 11, 2015

It's just really hard working in a coed lab because I'm too distracting to the male scientists #distractinglysexy pic.twitter.com/9cZMUpy6TL

— Danielle Spitzer (@DNAielleSpitzer) June 11, 2015

I did an entire Liver Transplant without crying or falling in love. #distractinglysexy pic.twitter.com/6RdApuzFo9

— Tiffany Anthony MD (@drtanthony) June 12, 2015

I wish I could concentrate in the lab, but I fell in love with Europasaurus holgeri #distractinglysexy #WomenInSTEM pic.twitter.com/UdKrpKAamJ

— Franziska Sattler-Morrison, M.Sc. (@ohyeahfranzi) June 12, 2015

Mind you, guys in the lab were always checking out my nice rack...#distractinglysexy #TimHunt pic.twitter.com/xT7jpL0hiE

— 🧬💻Laura Baxter 🌱🔬 (@scientist_me) June 10, 2015

There were also jokes about history’s most famous female scientists:

I'm really glad that Curie managed to take a break from crying to discover radium and polonium #distractinglysexy pic.twitter.com/txYVHoidK5

— Amy Remeikis (@AmyRemeikis) June 11, 2015

Rosalind Franklin was so #distractinglysexy that Watson and Crick forgot to give her credit for figuring out how DNA worked

— a luminous presence shaped like Seth D. Michaels (@sethdmichaels) June 12, 2015

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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com