The mask has not so much slipped as crashed to the floor. Stand up and be thanked, Sir Tim Hunt, fellow of the Royal Society (at the time of writing, at least) and the winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for physiology for his work on regulators of the cell cycle. Here at last is someone who has come out with it. Women at work are a nuisance.

Hunt chose his moment of public revelation at, of all places, a women’s convention on science and journalism in South Korea. Perhaps he thought they’d be flattered when he told them that the trouble with women in labs was that they fall in love and cry when they’re criticised.

Nobel scientist Tim Hunt: female scientists cause trouble for men in labs Read more

This is what one of the science journalists who was there, Connie St Louis tweeted. Note that old device, that get-out-of-jail-free admission of chauvinism. These are not the words of a victim whose meal was spiked with a mysterious truth drug, they are the proudly admitted perceptions of a scientist. A scientist. Drink that in.

Yet, from his reaction, which was in the familiar non-apology apology of “I am sorry if I have caused offence, I should never have said such a thing in front of journalists”, it appears that he thinks it is he who has been in some way traduced, confounded by that dratted tendency of women not to get the joke. It seems quite likely that he is even now overwhelmed with supportive messages from colleagues for confronting the feminist thought police.

Even the response of the Royal Society suggests that the great institution doesn’t entirely get it. Science needs everyone regardless of gender, they said as they frantically pedalled away from one of their leading lights. How about, sexism is wrong, full stop?

Yet this is a moment to savour. Hunt has at last made explicit the prejudice that undermines the prospects of everyone born with childbearing capabilities. It is not men who are the problem, it is women! Women are distracting. They provoke emotions. Worse even than that, they express emotions.

When criticised, they cry. All of this wasteful soppy girly stuff interferes with the male scientist’s duty to pursue truth with a single-minded purpose.

Sound familiar? A bit like, say, the educated man’s version of the argument that says rape victims who wear short skirts or drink too much have only themselves to blame? The argument that recommends ankle-length sackcloth in order to allow men to get on with the real work?

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In many ways, Hunt is one of those characters familiar from every workplace, someone who has never troubled to consider the world in which he lives except from the perspective of how well it services his needs.

But he brings a particular defence to his prejudice. He is in pursuit of the holy grail of truth.

Because of this, and his biologically endowed access to the right way to do it, he can legitimately shout at anyone who he thinks has failed to appreciate the majestic significance of his purpose. Only the biologically inferior react with tears.

What is both shocking and bewildering about Hunt’s jovial after-dinner remarks is that this is the considered view of someone whose life has been devoted to not taking the world for what it seems to be.

How bizarre that someone so entirely unreflective about his immediate surroundings can win a Nobel prize for original work. How bizarre that when he delivers his Nobel laureate lecture he describes (with a self-deprecation that is the luxury of an unchallenged inner sense of rectitude) the way that breakthroughs in his understanding came from mistakes, like running a centrifuge for too long or attributing unexpected results to contamination, but it never occurs to him to examine his own assumptions about the people with whom he works.

So here’s a hypothesis, Sir Tim. It’s not the women who are the problem. It’s you.