Slashdot Mirror
At a Workshop Last Week, a CERN Scientist Said 'Physics Was Invented and Built by Men -- Not By Invitation'; CERN Has Suspended the Scientist (bbc.com)
New submitter ilguido writes: At a workshop organized by CERN, Prof Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University said that "physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation", BBC reported Monday. Strumia's presentation [Google Drive link] that supports the idea that "physics is not sexist against women[...], however the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside" has already received a lot of criticism, with one female physicist defining Strumia's analysis as "simplistic, drawing on ideas that had long been discredited." In a statement on Sunday, CERN said, "It is unfortunate that one of the 38 presentations, by a scientist from one of the collaborating universities, risks overshadowing the important message and achievements of the event. CERN, like many members of the community, considers that the presentation, with its attacks on individuals, was unacceptable in any professional context and was contrary to the CERN Code of Conduct. It, therefore, decided to remove the slides from the online repository." On Monday, CERN said it has suspended the scientist from any activity at CERN with immediate effect, pending investigation into last week's event.
The greatest minds were never immune. Read up on the biographies of Newton, Tesla, etc. Humans have always been flawed. That was the single greatest achievement of the Scientific Method: making progress in the great game in spite of its flawed players.
Instead you'd rather these great minds ignore the truth and bow down to political correctness and pretend that everything that is not true really is? All in the name of making marginalized people feel better about themselves... That is absurd.
A physicist just wanting to do physics without politics injected.... imagine that.
If it really has been discredited, then quote the research that discredits it. Strumia has provided evidence to support his claims, and evidence is needed to dismiss those claims.
physics is not sexist against women
This is true. Physics has no opinion on the matter. Many physicists however are definitely sexist against women. Not all but enough to be a real problem.
One of the slides amounted to: "No one is seeking gender equality in jobs that get you killed." Is that true? I suspect the military and law enforcement may be an exceptions since there's a lot of social prestige, but I don't hate myself enough to read jezebel.
Im sure ill get modded down for this, but im actually glad someone called this guy out and suspended him. Way too many conferences already have one guy, or girl, who decides to bring a pot of shit to stir instead of any actual contribution to the conference. When they leave, they immediately claim their talk to be a success because "controversy = i must be right."
Alessandro Strumia showed up to a CERN conference with an axe to grind. He didnt show up to the workgroup with a new model for detecting leptons, a new theory of strong force interaction, or anything else that would have been legitimately controversial. Alessandro Strumia showed up to shitpost about gender. CERN is not 4chan. Come back when you want to solve real problems.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think only the one slide got him fired. Maybe the way he presented as well, I haven't seen that. The quote about physics' invention is very easy to misread, I can't blame CERN for reacting to that slide. Everything else... he's just attempting to analyze the issue. Nothing wrong with that.
Looking at the pdf presentation in the OP's link, he went somewhere that some people do not want to be discussed, Gender differences and gender preferences.
Instead of refuting his argument, it's easier to call him a sexist bigot and just discredit him that way.
Appears he's making the statement, historically men did dominate the field, but didn't primarily exclude women, and when women started joining they won Nobels. But many fields of study appears to have gender differences, and that sexism wasn't the cause, but gender preference.
He states his theory, cultural Marxism re-writing history to promote oppression as the reason women did not contribute. Along the same lines of re-shaping history to push the narative that exploration and advancements were performed by men who raped, murdered, stole land and murdered indigenous people.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not opinion and the facts are not hard to find for anyone who can be bothered to look for even 20 seconds on Google. Sexism is quite real and it is distressingly common in the field of physics and many other branches of science. It's ironic that you ask for evidence of sexism in an article about a guy who was fired because he (apparently) exhibited sexism publicly. If that isn't evidence I'm not quite sure you understand the meaning of the term.
His presentation provided data to support his position. In contrast you are offering nothing.
You didn't even bother to read his presentation. Had you have bothered to do so you would have noticed the sentence cited in the headline occurs under the heading "discrimination against women".
BTW the very next slide includes the heading "discrimination against men".
The idiot mentioned it in his own presentation: Women are overrepresented in the CERN administration. Why did he think he could give a scientific argument against the feminist agenda without getting reprimanded?
The more and more this small but loud group keeps pushing this nonsense, the sooner there will be a massive pushback against them and this agenda. Which is a shame because the snapback AWLAYS will undo what was previously accomplished.
What these idiots fail to realize is that it is OK to stop with progressive ideas once you reach a certain point. The people who used to push equality of the sexes have now transitioned into female subjugation of men at the expense of everything else. As someone who totally signed on for equality, this is NOT ok.
If you are a physicist, board member etc, were placed into that position by merit, and happen to be a woman good for you!
We should be at a point in history where we don't look at sex as a determining factor but ignore it in favor of a list of successful options.
But no, we aren't and can't focus on more important things because these loud nitwits have a hammer and see everything as a nail.
His being a dumb ass got him fired. Why do idiots like this feel entitled to bring up their backwards politics at non-political events?
If I'm working a job and presenting for my company and I go off on a rant about something political guess what will happen to me?
If you guess I probably will get fired you win. I'm tired of all these over privileged cry babies feeling like they have a right to throw out their politics on company time.
It's worth pointing out that the opposite would almost certainly not be the case though. If he had done a presentation on "Gender Diversity in Physics" that reached the opposite conclusions, the complaints wouldn't be made. And if you haven't noticed, the trend by the SJW crowd is to insert politics at ALL events, because "there is no such thing as a non-political event", and "being able to ignore politics is a white male privilege" and if you disagree, you're a bigot.
I'd be all for keeping these events non-political. Too bad one side has already decided that bridge must be crossed.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Yep.
Maybe the folks at CERN should have done the Scientific thing and refuted his paper using facts.
The statement, "physics is not sexist against women[...], however the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside" shouldn't be that hard to refute, no? Then they make a presentation the next time and shame that guy into a career at Starbucks.
But they didn't that, did they. All they did was spout platitudes designed to placate the SJW crowd.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
A single instance does not make a statistic. The great women on STEM do exist, but they are few. Far too few for this to be a measurement error.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A woman I know recently applied to a PhD position. She already had a master's in the topic, from a school pretty strong in the subject area, doing some pretty difficult work, plus a fair amount of science communication & outreach on the side, and was looking to go further. She got rejected from a well funded position (with several openings), and later, she made the mistake of looking at the student roster to see who had gotten in. All male, seemingly straight out of undergrad, none of whom had a master's. She was kind of pissed, because while she couldn't prove that was a result of sexism, it sure looks like it, you know? And that's ridiculous, we shouldn't be dismissing anyone based on their sex, but this is definitely happening in science and academia.
Funny thing though, while that story is true, I lied about the sexes. I swapped them. Still feel the same way?
I have a hard time dismissing claims that there is political bias against men when I can see it happen. And before some moron accuses me of being sexist, I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of very competent female scientists out there, there are. And I'm not saying that there isn't real sexism against women in science, there is, I've seen it, and anyone who denies that or covers for it is part of the problem. That doesn't change the fact that screwing over men is also happening, and that it is not the way to go about fixing anything.
But they didn't that, did they. All they did was spout platitudes designed to placate the SJW crowd.
In the current uber-politically-correct world, placating the SJW crowd is pretty much the only thing that matters anymore. Don't do that and you are automatically a racist, sexist, xenophobe, and other sassy words that end in "ist" and "phobe."
100% this.
If you're a scientist, instead of shutting someone up to mollify the SJW's, bust his ass up with FACTS.
Then, it's a win-win, double smackdown for Strumia if he is proven wrong, again, with FACTS.
Have you accounted for selection bias? By limiting your sample to women who have made it to the PhD level, you are potentially omitting women who did not progress as far because of gender discrimination. Some women are better than others at working in an environment with a pervasive "boys' club" mentality and thus may not see gender discrimination as an issue because they are less affected by it. Discrimination is a very difficult thing to quantify, so you can get very different results depending on who you ask, what you ask, and how you ask.
A lack of insight coupled with shamelessness is the defining characteristic of the bitter modern misogynist.
Personally I don't think you or I are in any position to evaluate his claims of reverse bias in hiring. Unless we knew ALL of the details he account might be 100 percent accurate. Or perhaps not.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Sigh.
1. This wasn't the US.
2. The 1st amendment is about not granting the government power to restrict your speech. It doesn't promise you that you can say any shit you like without fear of being fired by your employer, shunned by your neighbours, divorced by your spouse, disowned by your kids, not published by a newspaper or social media platform or book publisher, sued by your business partners, turned away by your customers, etc et bloody cetera.
When did rightwingers become such fucking whiners? Grow up and own your words and the consequences that flow from saying them. Christ knows, the rest of us have had to.
You don't get a invitation in the mail. You join by achievement, by accomplishment. All this gender talk is a distraction from real physics.
Well, no. You join by recognition of achievement, which came more readily for men than for women throughout most of history.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, he's not wrong. Almost all the biggest minds in physics and math were men
True but have you ever stopped to wonder why? This is NOT evidence that men are better at physics but evidence of the extremely sexist society which has existed for centuries. Yes, things are a lot better now than they used to be but you have to be a monumental idiot to not realize that sexism in the past was directly responsible for the lack of women in physics or indeed any science.
This is what should have been pointed out to him by someone in the audience. This is the way that you fix idiotic thinking. If you scare them into never expressing their views you will never have the opportunity to correct them.