After a 17-year-old intern from the Connecticut Science Center testified in a Connecticut House budget hearing that working at the Center had helped her overcome her fear of snakes, Rep. Ernest Hewett somehow thought it would be okay to tell her, “If you’re bashful, I got a snake sitting under my desk here.” As a result, Speaker of the House J. Brendan Sharkey has demoted Hewett from his position as deputy speaker and its accompanying pay bump.
Hewett has since issued a non-apology of sorts, but he also gave an interview to the Hartford Courant that only reinforces the impression of gross sexism:
“I purposely will not have female interns. My intern now is a male. I want to keep it like that. I’ve had female interns in the past that sit in my office all day. I thought it was totally weird and I didn’t want another. As a matter of fact, I went four, maybe six years without having an intern at all because of stuff like that. I have a male intern, the last two I’ve had were male.”
He went on to say that he could not choose to hire only male interns, but would prefer not to be assigned females, because “that way that keeps me good and that keeps everybody else good.”
So all you have to do to keep Hewett from treating women poorly is keep women away from him. Noted.