• Question: Would you encourage women to come in to your business or what do you think about the comment made by Tim Hunt ? (“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.”)

    Asked by 330artc47 to Nick, Andrew on 16 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by 760artc47.
    • Photo: Nicholas Hitchins

      Nicholas Hitchins answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      I think the comments made by Tim Hunt are disgusting and completely not representative of how people in science and engineering think. I would by all means encourage women into engineering. Good engineers are good engineers regardless of if they are male or female. Here at my company we are almost 50-50 male and female and our engineering department is half male and female and I would say that the medical engineering industry is one of the more balanced of the engineering industries.

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      I think the comments made by Tim Hunt are wrong and not representative of how engineers or scientists work. I think he’s made things worse by trying to say they were just a joke, and not apologising properly.

      @Nick is absolutely right when he says that good engineers are good engineers, whether they are female or male. There has been a 50:50 split in the PhD students that I’ve supervised. I’ve appointed them all because I believed they were the best person for the project.

      Civil engineering doesn’t have as equal a split as biomedical engineering, but at Imperial it is getting better, I think we are close to 40:60, Female:Male on the civil engineering undergraduate course. I think universities and schools have some work to do in explaining what engineering is to everyone. Hopefully initiatives like IAEGMOOH will really help to do this.

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