Scientist Shuts Down Would-Be Date Who Made A Gross Assumption About Her

Updated September 8, 2021

No matter how much time passes, it seems that some social issues remain as hard to stamp out as ever.

Although it's widely understood that discriminating against people based on the characteristics they were born with is both wrong and often illegal, the compulsion to do that in some people seems as hard to kill as a cockroach and about as unpleasant.

But since the most obvious ways of doing this tend to be easily identified and carry some heavy consequences, perpetrators of these problems are finding they have to be more subtle or couch their values in "jokes" to set up double standards or gatekeep their communities.

And that's what one scientist strongly suspects a man was trying to do after she matched with him on a dating app.

But before we get into this woman's tale, let's learn a little more about her.

Twitter | @mclaurenseries

Dr. Lauren McKeown is a planetary scientist who is soon to begin a new job at the Birkbeck Earth and Planetary Sciences department at the Univeristy of London.

But as she included in her Hinge bio, her specialization in icy planetary surfaces also provided an opportunity to work at NASA.

And at first, it seemed like the man she matched with responded really well to that fact about her.

Twitter | @mclaurenseries

It's definitely cool to meet someone who probably helped make things go into space in some way and it seemed like McKeown had a match who would treat her with respect.

And it clearly seemed promising to McKeown as well, since she soon opened up a chat line with him.

Twitter | @mclaurenseries

However, it didn't take him long to mess up this first impression when he decided to open with "so what are you, like the receptionist?"

In a later tweet, McKeown figured he probably meant that as a compliment about her appearance, but saw it as big red flag that he managed to find the most condescending and belittling way to do that.

And his attempt to walk it back by saying she looks "reasonably smart" wasn't really helping this patronizing impression.

And in a move that had McKeown joking "And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I am single," she let him know exactly how that remark made him look.

Twitter | @mclaurenseries

And as she would reveal in her response, there were multiple reasons why she wasn't impressed with his comments.

Aside from the "joking" implication that she was too attractive to be a scientist, McKeown also saw this person as looking down on the capabilities of receptionists like her mother.

But while some thought this was an excessive reaction to a joke, others didn't buy that the man was doing anything besides trying to "neg" her.

For those unaware, this is a common tactic among so-called "pick up artists" to subtly undermine a woman's self-confidence, which is then supposed to encourage a need to accept their advances.

And as multiple women working in STEM fields said in response to McKeown's tweet, this assumption that they can't really be scientists is one they've run into regularly.

As we can see here, one such example saw a man break up with a NASA employee because he didn't feel like "the smarter one" on the relationship.

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