A lecturer who revealed Sir Tim Hunt’s controversial comments about women in labs yesterday said she had ‘no regrets’ over the furore that cost him his job.

Connie St Louis caused a social media storm that led the Nobel Prize winner to resign from his honorary professorship after being accused of sexism.

Asked yesterday if she regretted Sir Tim losing his job, the lecturer in science journalism replied: ‘I’ve no regrets about breaking a journalistic story. This is about journalism. Secondly it’s about women in science. My intention was not for him to lose anything. But he didn’t lose anything. He resigned.’

UncoveredL Connie St Louis revealed the comments made by Sir Tim Hunt at a conference in South Korea

When asked whether he should get his job back, she told a meeting of the Association of British Science Writers in London: ‘What an interesting question... to me it’s a moot point... the point is we need to move the focus off him.’

Mrs St Louis, 57, was present at a conference in South Korea where Sir Tim, 72, joked that men and women should ‘work in separate labs’.

He told the audience: ‘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.’

Sir Tim, who won a Nobel Prize in 2001, later said his comments were light-hearted. But he quit his honorary professorship at University College London after allegedly being told to resign or be sacked, leading him to feel he had been ‘hung out to dry’.

Resigned: Sir Tim Hunt has now quit his professorship at University College London

A leaked European Commission source backed up his account of the speech, saying it was ‘warm and funny’ and that he said ‘now seriously’ after his controversial comments to show they were intended as a joke. But Mrs St Louis, who lectures at City University in London, said yesterday: ‘Whatever he said after “now seriously”, it’s still outrageous. He talks about women as girls... you make them cry, they fall in love with you, is he seriously saying that? Is that his own personal story? Why is he calling them girls? And then he goes on to advocate single-sex laboratories. Now seriously, is he thinking there should be single-sex laboratories?’

On his return to the UK, Sir Tim resigned from roles at UCL, the Royal Society and the European Research Council. His wife said she was told by a senior UCL figure –understood to be Dean of Life Sciences Geraint Rees – that he ‘should resign or be sacked.’

But yesterday a UCL source denied this version of events. They said there was little chance of Sir Tim being given his honorary professorship back, adding: ‘I don’t think reinstatement’s on the agenda and I don’t think Sir Tim wants it.