Category: Italy

by Alessandro Strumia
(Source: Quillette – a few days before Cathy Young’s article)

Six months ago CERN hosted a workshop on “High Energy Theory and Gender.” Nearly all the contributors to this and previous workshops on the same topic endorsed the view that gender imbalances in physics, particularly in the higher echelons, are predominantly due to sexual discrimination. (…) One attendee claimed that only the military has a higher rate of sexual harassment, although she didn’t say which country’s armed forces she was thinking of.

Read the full article here

A well-researched and well-written article by Cathy Young on Quillette (an online Independent Magazine – highly recommendable).

Her conclusion:
Lastly, one can disapprove of the way in which Strumia chose to throw down the gauntlet to the “gender experts” and yet recognize that he was responding to a genuinely toxic atmosphere created by the feminism-in-science movement in its current form.

Read the whole article here

As previously announced and the BBC now reports, Cern has decided not to extend Professor Alessandro Strumia’s status of guest professor.

We have now closed the petition and have forwarded the petition and the list of 2370 signatories from 90 countries to the director general of CERN.
We also attached the detailed rebuttal of the criticism directed at Prof. Strumia by the “Particles for Justice” group/petition.

Thanks to everyone who supported this campaign.

Even though Prof. Strumia has now decided to leave CERN of his own accord in the wake of this harassment, we hope we have clearly documented the immense dissatisfaction of concerned scientists and citizens around the world.

We will continue to document such cases and hope you find this website useful.

Prof. Strumia (suspended from CERN, see our petition) was heavily criticized for his lecture in the autumn of 2018 at a one-day symposium on Gender and Physics. We have published a series of articles here.

A physics Ph.D. student published a full rebuttal of this criticism. Prof. Fiamengo of Ottawa University has now published her view of the “Particles of Justice” criticism.

Preface by ScienceCensored
It is telling that the author of this rebuttal of the paper against Strumia – a graduate student of physics – has chosen to remain anonymous – for fear of endangering his Ph.D. that he is currently working on. I have quoted the first two paragraphs here and provided a link to the full paper, which is detailed (estimated reading time 20-25 minutes).

Justice for Strumia

On the 4th of October, a blog post titled “Particles for Justice” was published by a group of physicists (henceforth referred to as “the authors”) condemning the views of professor Alessandro Strumia as “morally reprehensible”. They claim that the presentation he gave at a CERN conference on “High Energy Theory and Gender” was incorrect in asserting, that the degree of sexism in physics is overestimated, that biological factors adequately explain the observed performance disparity between men and women in science. He further claimed that there exists a widespread, ideologically motivated push to hire people based on factors other than merit. Strumia is accused of “mining” and “misrepresenting” data to support his claims, and “belittling” the legitimacy of female scientists.
In this piece, I will review the claims and sources presented by the authors. My findings lead me to believe that their outrage is misplaced and unsupported by the data they themselves cite. Furthermore, I will attempt to analyze the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary equality movements and explain why their intellectual foundations make controversies like the present one inevitable. It is my hope that this piece will help physics remain (as it should be) a field where the nature of reality can be investigated rationally without the distracting influence of moral outrage, unjustified accusations of bias, and impetuous campaigns to fix what is not demonstrably broken.

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