Test Tube Babes

The initial video in a campaign by the European Commission to encourage women to consider a career in science has generated some heat amongst the politically correct. Using normal advertising techniques in what is effectively an advertisement (imagine that!), they decline to portray women scientists in the usual stereotypical way (plain looking, mousey, wearing non-branded glasses) and instead show some more glamourous specimens. The message is that women need not be labelled unattractive by becoming scientists.

Naturally, people have mouthed off about this, including  a number of women quoted by the Daily Telegraph, that bastion of feminism. For example,Victoria Herridge, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, complained that the 56-second video did not give a "proper representation of what it means to be a scientist". She obviously thinks that 56 seconds is enough to achieve that, which shows what she thinks of her chosen field. She added, in the face of the scientific evidence to the contrary, that "you could not make it up." Err ... Vickie ... someone did.

Another lab babe, one Lisa-Marie (named after Elvis's daughter?) Mayne, a postgraduate student (of something), complained "as a woman of science" that the ad was "garish". Oh dear. Did it offend your fashion sense, Lisa?

And to top it all, a  "Dr." Petra (named after the Blue Peter dog?) Boynton, a social psychologist (no, I don't know what that is either) at University College London, wrote: "For the love of all things holy what is this ****?" Aside from the asterisked out coarse language (ooh, how liberated you are, doctor!), I cannot imagine this said in anything other than a broad southern Irish accent. Yes, that's what the campaign needs, a bead-fiddling fish wife.