When it comes to feminists versus scientists, the feminists always win.

Last year it was "Shirtgate." Last November physicist Matt Taylor successfully landed a space probe on a comet last November–the first such achievement in human history. But who cared about that? For weeks Taylor was vilified in social media and the press because of–horrors!–the shirt with pictures of pinup girls  that he wore to a press conference about the space feat. Eveyone forgot  about that boring old comet.

And now the Erynyes have descended again to punish a scientist–this time the British Nobel Prize-winner Tim Hunt. At least Taylor got to keep his job (with the European Space Agency). Not so, Hunt. He was forced out of his job as an honorary professor of life sciences at University College London yesterday because of–get this–some remarks he made at a conference in Seoul!

Here's what Hunt said:

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Hunt told the audience at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea on Tuesday, according to people who were present.

“Three things happen when they are in the lab … you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.”

The feminists promptly started to…cry. Actually, to scream: Sexism, misogyny, why women are underrepresented in STEM fields, you name it. "Chauvinist pig" was one of the mildest of the Twitter-IEDs hurled at Hunt, along with personal digs about Hunt's supposed lousy love life and his supposed envy of  his "brilliant" female colleagues.

And it didn't help when Hunt didn't quite grovel afterwards the way he was supposed to:

I’m really sorry that I said what I said. It was a very stupid thing to do in presence of all those journalists. And what was intended was a sort of light-hearted, ironic comment … was apparently interpreted deadly seriously by my audience. But what I said was quite accurately reported.

It’s terribly important that you can criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them. If they break in to tears then you hold back from getting at the absolute truth. Science is about nothing except getting at the truth. And anything (that) gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

I mean I’m really, really sorry that I caused any offense. That’s awful. I certainly didn’t mean … I just meant to be honest actually.

Good for him! He actually noticed that there's such a thing as on-the-job romance, and that when attractive men and attractive women work side by side, love tends to…happen. And I myself, having worked in offices full of women, can tell you all about the tears.

But Hunt, having committed the ultimate sin against feminism–honesty about differences between the sexes–had to resign, not just from his professorship, but also from the Royal Society, Britain's most distinguished scientific organization, where Hunt had been a fellow since 1991. And just to twist the knife in Hunt's wound, University College issued a don't-let-the-door-slam-you press release: “UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.”

Amid all of this self-righteous wrath hardly any anyone in the press got around to mentioning what Hunt had received the Nobel Prize for. Along with Paul Nurse and Leland Hartwell, Hunt was awarded the Nobel for physiology or medicine in 2001 for discovering the proteins that regulate cell division–a key understanding of the workings of life. Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 2006.