Women in Physics/CERN

A link I missed out the last time (which should've been the first as it summarises the situation):

Cern scientist: 'Physics built by men - not by invitation' - "He told his audience of young, predominantly female physicists that his results "proved" that "physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside". He produced a series of graphs which, he claimed, showed that women were hired over men whose research was cited more by other scientists in their publications, which is an indication of higher quality. He also presented data that he claimed showed that male and female researchers were equally cited at the start of their careers but men scored progressively better as their careers progressed. Prof Strumia pointed to behavioural research which he suggested may account for the disparity.One study, he told his audience, indicated that "men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people" and another, he claimed, suggested that there was a "difference even in children before any social influence". Prof Strumia said that these conclusions may "not be fully right... (but) the opposite assumption of identical brains is ideology". As evidence of discrimination against male researchers, Prof Strumia claimed that "Oxford University extends exam times for women's benefit" and "Italy offers free or cheaper university for female (research) students"" 

 

Gender Controversy Comes to Physics: A Response to the Statement Against Alessandro Strumia

"around 20% of PhD-holding physicists are women. Although this varies by country, that number has remained roughly consistent in the US over the last twenty years. Physics is thus near the bottom among STEM fields, as ranked by proportion of women...

several presentations dealt with gender issues directly. Apparently, Strumia asked if he could contribute a talk, and the organizers accepted. I am a high-energy researcher and first heard about the fracas after it erupted over the weekend. I was directed to the Particles for Justice statement. After reading it through, and then checking Strumia’s slides, I found I could not in good conscience sign it. Indeed, there are problems with Strumia’s talk, but I was greatly disappointed by the reply, and frankly embarrassed that many respected scientists would sign a statement that seems so lacking in scientific and ethical rigor. I thought to myself, how can we endorse a polemic that is at least as bad as the talk it criticizes? ...

Strumia’s talk advanced the argument that there is no anti-female bias in the field and that gender differences are driven by interest and ability. These are complicated issues and he can’t claim to have settled them. There remain important caveats and confounds, but the argument is not one that has been refuted either and I think it deserves consideration. Additionally, he made a serious mistake in one comment, by bringing up a personal comparison, which was rightly condemned by the community.

The criticism of Strumia, however, has not been confined to the unprofessional comparison or to a measured evaluation of the science. Instead, there has been an effort to demonize him and cast his arguments as pseudo-science and easily refuted bunk. In doing so, his critics have repeatedly misrepresented him, invoked specious arguments, misled people as to the state of the evidence and generally behaved contrary to the spirit of good science...

The talk is written in a casual style, including cartoons and jokes, along with a lot of plots and bullet point items. This is not uncommon within high-energy physics. Links are included in his talk to various sources supporting his claims. The basis for his own analysis is a paper by Strumia and Torre on the arXiv depository. His analysis employs a large dataset of citations and job positions from the INSPIRE website which is used widely among high energy physicists to monitor papers and authors...

Strumia’s talk does not address every criticism that might be made. He does not include references to every paper claiming to find sexism in some aspect of the STEM fields, or every study that might question his own sources. This would be an impossible task and it is not asked of any researcher. His sources appear to be reasonable, in the sense of not being dismissed in the field...

the statement begins: “We write here first to state, in the strongest possible terms, that the humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, disability, gender presentation, or sexual identity is not up for debate.” This is a fine sentiment, but a deeply deceptive bit of rhetoric. Nowhere in Strumia’s slides is anyone’s humanity questioned, nor does he even raise the issue of race, ethnicity, gender identity (as distinct from sex), religion, disability, or gender presentation. It is unethical to imply that he did. Strumia’s views can be summed up in the argument that the distribution of women in physics is consistent with personal choices and ability, that it does not show signs of anti-female bias, and that the theory that the numbers are driven by discrimination is inconsistent with the data. Those claims are certainly disputed, but they no more question women’s humanity than the claim that male weightlifters dominate world records due to greater male size and interest. Similarly, the authors condemn his “open discrimination and personal attacks.” While I share the concern over the personal comparison, nothing in his slides discriminates against women or calls for it. The authors write, “It is clear to all of us that Strumia is not an expert on these topics and is misusing his physics credentials to put himself forward as one.” Strumia does not present himself as an expert in gender studies, nor does he rely on his credentials as a physicist. This is also not a standard applied to other speakers at the workshop. For example, Dr. Jessica Wade has a degree in physics and works on light emitting diodes. Although serving on several women’s councils, she lists no academic papers in gender studies. Nonetheless, the fifth slide of her talk announces, in regard to the issue of women’s participation in STEM fields, “this has NO biological origin.” Her slide links to a paper on sex differences in school grades which makes no such claim. In fact, its findings are quite compatible with Strumia’s view. I don’t wish to single out Dr. Wade, who is entitled to her argument, but to point out the hypocrisy...

Strumia, however, did not claim that harassment never happens, he argued that discrimination was not the cause of the gender imbalance. According to the NASEM report, for faculty/staff-on-female-student harassment in the University of Texas system, 1% of male and female science students report sexual coercion and 4%(2%) of females (males) report unwanted sexual attention. Some 17% (13%) report sexist hostility and 8% (5%) describe crude behavior. What is notable is that these numbers are the same or lower than those in non-STEM fields, in Engineering, or in Medicine. In particular, female students in medicine reported a 45% rate of sexist hostility... we don’t see evidence of exceptional rates of harassment in science, and we see them much higher in a female-majority profession like medicine. While harassment surely happens in physics as in all fields, including it would apparently only strengthen Strumia’s assertion that it does not drive the gender differences between fields. This criticism of Strumia also elides his claims that women are better represented in fields like Business and Law, which have “real power” and better pay. It also fails to address his contention that they are better represented in administrative positions than as physicists or technicians.

2. The statement criticizes Strumia’s citation of the “Gender Equality Paradox,” which finds higher-equality countries tend to have bigger gender gaps in STEM. They write “This claim ignores cultural differences, and also the possibility that women in such countries have fewer career options outside of academia. Without controlling for such effects, any attempt to draw conclusions is meaningless.” This is a deeply unscientific response. The “paradox” is in fact a result of attempting to control for cultural differences...

[The authors link] a webpage collecting a number of recent articles discussing gender issues in academics. The articles are quite disparate in methods, goals and findings. In fact, they include an entire section on articles that find lack of bias or bias in favor of women in STEM...

The question of why men produce a higher citation index throughout their careers does not change the fact that they do...

The authors write of citation counts that “using them as a substitute for scientific quality is very problematic.” This is undoubtedly true, especially for individual papers, also for individual authors. Yet, no one seems to believe they are meaningless in the aggregate. For instance, people are very concerned about impact factor, which is a citation-based rating of journals and which does indeed seem to correlate with those considered most prestigious, at least within a field. The basic idea that important papers should accrue citations and forgettable ones should not is hard to ignore...

They “reiterate that Strumia’s arguments are morally reprehensible.” I cannot agree. Whether his scientific case is sound or not, his hypothesis is not reprehensible. Strumia believes physics is on average a meritocracy, which I think most scientists would agree is the ideal. If he is mistaken then he is scientifically wrong, but this does not reflect on his morals.

They continue, “Finally, we would also like to underline how grossly unethical it is to misrepresent the topic of one’s talk to workshop organizers to promote an agenda which is antithetical to the workshop itself.” The title of his talk “Bibliometrics data about gender issues in fundamental theory” is accurate. It does not indicate his conclusions, or commentary towards the end of the talk. This is commonplace in academic talks, and does not seem out of context in a session on gender participation. Indeed, no one has raised this issue regarding the other talks. The problem is apparently that the organizers assumed Strumia would not advance a conclusion they disagreed with, and that he would not criticize other viewpoints. This does not comport with a scientific attitude in my opinion...

The authors then urge future organizers to seek guidance from certain experts. The first link goes to a book by Dr. Karen Barad on her theory of “agential realism,” which is described as “Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.” The third link is to a psychoanalytic analysis of interpretations of quantum mechanics. This is not the kind of work most physicists would endorse, and certainly not what is considered rigorous science. The other citations are to opinion pieces with two exceptions. One is an uncontroversial report on the number of women in physics. The other is a study which finds women-led papers in astronomy receive fewer citations, consistent with Prof. Strumia’s findings."

 

This is the way physics ends. Not with a Big Bang, but a feminist whimper

"We live in the era of the forced apology, and so it’s refreshing to see theoretical particle physicist Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa, refusing to apologize for defending science from feminist blitzkrieg. Unsurprisingly, thousands of Strumia’s colleagues are now denouncing him in a disturbing example of the war on science being waged across the western world today.

It has become a truism that any academic field in which the number of women is not at least equal to the number of men must be a field in which sexism is keeping women out. Any man who contends that there is no sexism in his field is immediately held up as one of sexism’s most dangerous exemplars.

We’re talking about elite fields in academia, not dirty and dangerous male-dominated jobs like front-line soldiering, long-haul trucking, garbage collection, street paving, commercial fishing, mining, logging, roofing, sanitation, construction, sewer repair, and so on. Feminists aren’t fighting to get more women into these jobs. Hence these jobs are never the focus of panels of outraged experts or public statements by academics who have made comfortable and well paying careers out of enforcing male guilt.

When Professor Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa presented a paper at a conference of the elite European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN); a conference on high-energy theory and gender, he must have known that a non-feminist presentation would go down about as well as Galileo’s cosmology before the Inquisition. According to the church of feminism, all men in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), must manifest deep concern about the declared “woman problem” and must pledge to make ever greater efforts, even including perhaps sacrificing the best and brightest, in order to meet diversity goals.

And this is a church in which confessing your sins won’t bring you any forgiveness—so don’t even think about it.

As Strumia mentioned in his presentation, physics is a special community of researchers dedicated to understanding the truth of nature; its requirements are rigorous intellectual honesty and reliance on quantitative evidence. Real science cannot flourish when these requirements are suppressed for any social goal...

he looked at the claim, made in a 2016 paper, that women’s contributions to physics are passed over because male physicists tend not to cite papers with female-first authors. He analyzed the data and found that both male and female researchers cited more papers with male-first authors, and to the same degree. Male-first authored papers were likely more often cited by both men and women, he suggested, because the male-authored papers were more significant, not because of a bias against women.

On page 12, Strumia considered the evidence for bias against women in physics hiring by plotting the number of citations male and female researchers have typically had when hired for their first job. Citations—the number of times one’s published work is cited by others—are one major way of determining the quality of a person’s research: the more cited, the more significant and influential. Up until 1995, male and female researchers had a comparable number of citations when first hired. But since 1995, female researchers have been typically hired with less than half of the citations a male PhD graduate has needed to be hired. In other words, Strumia’s graph shows that from 1995 to the present—over the past 23 years—hiring has been overwhelmingly stacked against men.

Strumia showed that female scientists are, at whatever stage, hired with fewer citations than male scientists. In addition, bias against men extends to the awarding of fellowships also. On page 15 of his presentation, Strumia showed that the average number of citations for young male physicists awarded prestigious CERN fellowships is about twice the number of citations for female CERN fellows. So CERN fellowships are being awarded regularly to lesser qualified female physicists because they’re female. Strumia demonstrated that male physicists are more productive, again by a factor of 2, than female physicists throughout the whole course of their careers...

A public letter condemning Strumia, co-authored by 18 mostly U.S. based physicists, was posted on a website calling itself Particles for Justice. To date, the letter has received thousands of scientists’ signatures.

I’ve read a lot of public statements by far-left intellectuals, but I think this one might be the most unhinged I’ve ever seen. It begins with a histrionic assertion that the “humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities …” is “not up for debate.”

The clear implication is that Strumia himself, merely by objecting to feminist policy, was calling into question the humanity of women or of any other people, which he was not. Everyone who signed this letter should be ashamed of such dishonesty. The co-authors of the letter also lament that Strumia used his physics credentials to pretend that he had something to contribute to a discussion of gender bias, which is not his area of expertise (though of course if he had made a plea for more aggressive measures to promote women in physics they would never have complained that he lacked the credentials to do so).

They continued that “those among us who are familiar with the relevant literature know that Strumia’s conclusions are in stark disagreement with those of experts.”

This is a classic academic feminist modus operandi. Create a discipline that is based not on scientific methodology but on untestable claims about privilege, intersectionality, lived experience, and unconscious bias. Staff the discipline with ideologues who launch journals and cite one another in their articles. Then claim that a real scientist has no standing to use quantitative methods to challenge the findings of your fake discipline.

In order to show us what only gender experts can see, the letter writers enumerate a series of rebuttals to Strumia’s points. Their first and most general criticism is that Strumia “frequently made the basic error of conflating correlation with causation.” This might be a meaningful criticism, but they fail to give a single instance in which it is the case.

Strumia’s basic argument is that when feminists claim that something must be done about physics’ so-called woman problem, and when it can be shown that less-qualified women are being hired in place of more qualified men, then feminist policies are causing discrimination against men in physics. I don’t see where the logical error is. On the other hand, one could certainly argue that the authors of the letter continually confuse correlation with causation. They find that fewer women work in high-level physics than men, and that fewer women receive Nobel Prizes in Physics, and they conclude that therefore women are discriminated against due to sexism.

This is a clear case of correlation not necessarily involving causation. Physicist, heal thyself!...

when women cite more male authors than female authors, bias is still a factor because women can be just as biased as men. This is a real stretch. What happened to the special authority of women’s “lived experience,” which has become the basis for much feminist theory? If women themselves are just as biased against women as men are said to be, how can bias against women be measured at all, if there is no unbiased standpoint, and then why is it so important to hire more women into physics if they will merely replicate the biases of their male colleagues? The authors do not pursue this line of reasoning...

It seems to say that these scientists are citing the male-first-authored papers only because everyone else is citing them, and that has little, if anything, to do with the importance of the publications. If true, this would seem to suggest that physicists are incapable of, or are not interested in, judging the worth of the research conducted by their fellow scientists, quite an astounding assertion that would surely call the entire physics enterprise into question. The letter writers do not pursue this line of reasoning either...

Again the letter writers rely on a classic feminist modus operandi: it doesn’t matter how often female advantage can be concretely proven; a generalized, conveniently unmeasurable anti-woman bias can never be absolutely disproven and is constantly evoked as if it were a self-evident truth. Unmeasurable factors are again the fail safe in response to Strumia’s graph about women’s lesser achievements in physics throughout their careers...

if social expectations are factors in female underachievement in physics, why is it that in many other academic fields in the Social Sciences, and the Humanities, where presumably women face the very same social expectations, women’s numbers and career contributions have massively increased over the past three decades? Why would social expectations be a deciding factor in suppressing female achievement only in Physics and other Mathematics-based disciplines? The letter writers, of course, do not attempt an explanation.

Overall, the letter writers make no attempt to analyze Strumia’s graphs to show how any of his numbers or inferences are inaccurate. All they’ve got is their moral outrage.

And such outrage powers their concluding ad hominem attack. The letter writers end by pointing to what they call Strumia’s “deep contempt for more than half of humanity that clearly comes from some source other than scientific logic.”

I suppose they couldn’t resist. Not only were they compelled to denounce Strumia as a misogynist (and a racist, even though he said nothing about race in his presentation), but they had to claim in good Stalinist fashion that he may be mentally ill as well, or at least a hater, as anyone must be who would object to the hiring of less qualified people on the basis of characteristics totally irrelevant to physics.

And the letter writers go even further to allege that women and other marginalized people who come into contact with Strumia will suffer from his claimed bigotry, the clear implication being that Strumia’s professional colleagues and superiors should remove him from positions in which he would supervise graduate students or participate in hiring decisions.

The mind boggles at their willingness to make such a vicious allegation. But when you can’t rebut someone’s arguments, and when you can’t begin to prove that he harbours contempt for women, the only thing you have left is mob attack in an attempt to ensure that Strumia’s professional life never recovers from his decision to call out the bullshit that passes for serious discussion at a science conference.

I can only hope that Strumia’s colleagues will resist the call to punishment, that they will recognize the utter irrationality of the letter writers’ claims. And yet thousands of scientists have seen fit to attach their names to the document. Just scroll through the list on the additional page attached to the letter and look at the roll call of shame.

Name after name after name of presumably smart people, patting themselves on the back for their virtue, finding it easier to demean a leading scientist than to deal honestly with his data. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, this is the way that physics ends, not with a Big Bang but a feminist whimper."

If you disagree with liberals about "minorities", you are denying the humanity of "minorities".