Officials at the world’s largest particle accelerator have suspended an Italian physicist pending an investigation of his “highly offensive” presentation on gender issues that raised new concerns about sexism in science.
Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, said on Monday that Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa was out of line in his talk on Friday for a seminar on High Energy Theory And Gender.
The Geneva-area centre, which runs the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), said it had no prior knowledge of the content of the presentation and cited its “attacks on individuals” as “unacceptable in any professional context”.
[Update] On Monday 1 October, CERN suspended the scientist from any activity at CERN with immediate effect, pending investigation into last week’s event. https://t.co/HhvNSxPVPg https://t.co/o5QGg4L9VZ
— CERNpress (@CERNpress) October 1, 2018
A Cern spokesman confirmed a slide presentation on Mr Strumia’s talk found online but said a recording was not immediately available.
One slide read: “Physics invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation.”
Laura Covi, who studies cosmology at Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, and was at the Friday seminar, said Mr Strumia’s comments did not go over well.
“He was claiming that some of the positions women were getting, they’re getting positions with fewer (journal) citations than men,” she said. “I’m not so sure his thesis was supported by the data.”
Ms Covi acknowledged some of the world’s most eminent physicists have been men, but said that was “mostly a historical bias” since men have been able to study physics longer than women.
She also disputed that citations are an indicator of quality and said it was not her experience that female physicists landed jobs with fewer journal publications than men.
Ms Covi said Mr Strumia has made provocative comments in the past and said after his presentation, he was challenged by many at the seminar — so much so that the chair had to abruptly end the session when it ran over.
“People were upset by what he was saying. And then he later started to make statements that were completely unscientific,” she said.
“I don’t think he represents the majority view. There were a few men who were there but they didn’t support his view.”
