On Nov 13, 2014, the European Space Agency landed a space craft on a comet — an astonishing feat of human ingenuity — but less than 24-hours later, that story was overshadowed by the ramblings of self-appointed dress code enforcers masquerading as journalists. One of the scientists had donned a tacky shirt featuring leather-clad babes presumably to match his persona as the token non-conformist, but, considering the sheer volume of indignant commentary it sparked, you’d be forgiven for concluding that this one man was responsible for an entire generation of women abstaining from STEM.

Despite the ridiculous level of attention given to this fashion faux pas, if there were some consistency in the scale of coverage given to certain incidents of profound injustice, one could conclude that there was some coherent message being sent. Surely, if one man’s poor fashion sense is enough to condemn an entire academic field for having a culture of misogyny, a group of immigrants surrounding and sexually assaulting hundreds of women and children of their gracious host nation must, at the very least, be endemic of some deeper cultural problem that is far more dangerous.

Unfortunately, it’s clear from the proportionality of coverage between these two incidents that there is no such coherency. As of writing this there are a mere 350 articles appearing in Google News related to this incident almost a week after the attacks. Compare that to the over 4,000 spurred by shirtgate within the same amount of time. Perhaps this is an example of what Maajid Nawaz refers to as regressivism.