"unless you subscribe to a severely Neanderthal take on male psychology"
OT but I'm led to note that the Neanderthals coexisted with h sapiens sapiens1 for much of their existence. I'm not aware of any convincing evidence that they were less intelligent. (Brain size is not very relevant in human beings above a certain mass, as is well known from research.) Perhaps the Neanderthals lost out because they were less aggressive and more egalitarian.
However...
If the professor had said that some women students get crushes on more senior male scientists, and it was necessary to be very professional in this situation - that would be quite legitimate (though probably not in the circumstances of the speech.) It was the unreconstructed form of his remarks that was the problem. There is an important sub-text there about how we deal with our biological past in the context of modern society, but he didn't address it. And I'm inclined to agree that the hashtag was a bit uncalled for in the immediate context, but it did have a role in bringing out that women do do hard science research which, at a time when people are about to finalise university decisions, is surely a good thing.
1Given our remarkable destructive capacity perhaps we should rename ourselves h sapiens deinanthropos, by analogy to dinosaurs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
