BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Women in physics - "An Italian physics professor has been reprimanded by the nuclear laboratory CERN in Switzerland after what it called a highly offensive presentation at an event it hosted about women in science. Physics was invented and presented by men said Alessandro Strumia from Pisa University. It is not by invitation. We spoke to Professor Strumia…‘I went to give this talk where they say very bad things and how against man and how they discriminate and so on. So I did the the simple checks that I believe everybody should have done before making these claims and we have some surprise, I find that that maybe, it looks like maybe it's the opposite. Now if you want to be hired it's easier if you are woman than men. That's what comes out from data. That's not my opinion.’...
‘When he proposed his abstract for this conference, he knew full well that he was attending a conference that will be attended by majority women working on string theory and high energy physics. And he proposed an abstract that looked at kind of women's historical representation and academic publishing and said he used this opportunity to insult the people who'd spent an awful long time putting together the conference, an audience of young women and then women scientists all over the world.’
‘What did he say that was insulting?’
‘He basically said that women weren’t as good at physics and were promoted too early and had received a disproportionate amount of funding when you looked at their ability and then cited a whole bunch of really dodgy gender science and right wing thinkers’...
‘He’s saying it's not an opinion, this is what comes out of the data he has looked at’
‘Well, he looked at academic publishing and citations, the number of citations on particular papers in high energy physics, which receive huge numbers of citations and a multi multi person projects. Right, CERN is a huge international research center, which is contributed to by so many different scientists. And then he had the audacity to compare himself to other senior women who had been promoted and said that he deserved jobs that he hadn't been given’… ‘I spoke earlier on in the day about the phenomenal work that places like the Institute of Physics and Imperial College have been doing to really tackle gender stereotyping and bias really early on. And I think that the thing that we have to remember in all of this that's particularly sad is the organizers had worked so hard to put together a really great conference to give these early career women in string theory an opportunity to present their work at somewhere as prestigious as CERN and discuss things that they may face throughout their career because of their gender. And I think this is a such a ridiculous conversation that we have to keep having when it's, when it's 2018’
‘And now, CERN’s essentially reprimanded him and removed the slides from its website. Is that enough?’
‘I don't think it's enough. Because when you think about it it's not only a problem for the people in the room who heard it or the scientists online who responded afterwards. But it's when people in positions of authority like him teach the next generation that they’re training that this kind of behavior’s okay and and that's what I think is really damaging.’
Apparently science cannot be "right wing", whatever that means. And "gender science" is dodgy in some instances (presumably only when it makes women look bad)
Apparently citations are not the way to assess science. I like that the (female) interviewee just kept going on about how this was unacceptable - instead of actually engaging with his argument
Cern cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia - ""Some people hated hearing about higher male variance: this idea comes from Darwin, like other offensive ideas that got observational support," he told BBC News."Science is not about being offended when facts challenge ideas held as sacred"... "For months, Cern kept 'investigating' if my 30-minute talk might have violated Cern rules [requiring an] 'obligation to exercise reserve and tact in expressing personal opinions and communication to the public'," Prof Strumia said."In such a case, they would have opened some procedure, where I would have been able [to defend] myself. This never happened."
When you challenge people's religion, they get offended
Sexism in STEM isn’t as clearcut as you’ve been led to believe - "When Canadian physics professor Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize last week, it was bound to be a big story. She’s only the third woman out of about 200 to have ever received the honour.When journalists gathered at the University of Waterloo where Strickland works, she was asked about her gender. Stickland told the reporters that the world has come a long way since the last time the Nobel was awarded to a woman, in 1963, and that she “has always been paid the same and treated the same” as men.Yet the Canadian news media promptly ignored her words, choosing instead to spin her achievement into a story about persistent gender bias. CBC’s The National declared that despite Strickland’s success, “sexism appears to be alive and well” in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields... It’s true that Strumia, who is not a native English speaker, wrote the awkward sentence that “physics was invented and built by men,” but he immediately followed that by saying women like Marie Curie were welcomed into physics “after showing what they can do.” In other words, physics is a meritocracy; women who are up to the task are included... the University of Melbourne has created jobs for math professors that men cannot even apply for... He also pointed to data showing that women are published just as often in physics journals as men, and, rather than being passed over, are hired earlier in their careers. Most damning, he offered a link to what may be the only recent study directly testing for gender bias in STEM faculty hiring. Cornell University psychologists Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci had 363 faculty members evaluate narrative summaries describing hypothetical female and male applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships. They found that when men and women presented with equal qualifications, women were ranked first by a two-to-one margin in biology, engineering and psychology. Only in economics were candidates of the two sexes treated roughly equally. The study also tested whether faculty differ in how they assess women who take a one-year maternity leave. It turns out men prefer to hire mothers who took parental leaves. Williams and Ceci concluded that their findings “do not support omnipresent societal messages regarding the current inhospitality of the STEM professoriate for women at the point of applying for assistant professorships. Efforts to combat formerly widespread sexism in hiring appear to have succeeded.” So what then explains the disparity? Strumia asserts it’s the same reason women now make up a majority of graduates in education, law, medicine and the humanities. Women and men have different interests and abilities... If the media had only listened to what Strickland said at her press conference, they might have learned this lesson. “If we all do what we’re really good at,” she said, “it just helps the world.”"
Women's voices are only valuable when they say what you want them to
Alessandro Strumia: the data doesn’t lie — women don’t like physics | News Review | The Sunday Times - "All of which makes Strumia — who admits, with justified understatement, that he is “no good at politics” — choose his words carefully when he agrees after some hesitation to speak to The Sunday Times. Six months after the offending talk he appears bemused by the resulting “mess” and dismayed at the decision by the Cern administrators to reheat the controversy by publicly sacking him, given that he had been led to believe by his fellow physicists there that the matter would be resolved quietly.Yet despite the powerful forces ranged against him, the Italian insists he will not back down. “It’s not only Cern, but a lot of institutions that have a problem when someone says something that is not politically correct,” he says.“A big mess happens and the institutions are no longer strong enough to protect freedom of speech or freedom of research . . . But this is not my opinion, it is what comes out if you check the data.”... Although the theory is by no means universally accepted, Strumia is a believer. “This idea is supported by scientific results but if you mention it, you get fired. It’s a crazy situation,” he says, claiming it is the existence of such “huge pressure to silence this kind of research” that has prompted him to speak out... Does Strumia regret the whole controversy? As the date of the talk had approached, he says it had become clear to him and his colleagues working on the subject that their findings would be controversial, provoking jokes last summer about “who would be fired” over it.His readiness to put his head above the parapet was inspired in part by disappointment at Cern’s failure in past years to follow up its discovery of the Higgs boson, popularly known as the God particle, in 2012 with other breakthroughs. “If Cern had made more big discoveries in physics, I would have remained silent and focused on physics,” he says.“I was willing to risk this now because it was important to talk and I would regret more the opposite — staying silent.“I expect that the bad politics that forbids you from talking about this will disappear in 10 or 15 years, so maybe it’s a good long-term investment. This is not about gender. It is about excessive political correctness. There are ideas that are wrong but nobody is allowed to say it.”"
Alessandro Strumia: Another Politically-Correct Witch-Hunt, or a More Complicated Story? - "Strumia actually did what Damore was wrongly accused of doing: he disparaged his female colleagues, not by insinuation but overtly and by name. He also made what was, in effect, a grave accusation, suggesting not only that Ceresole undeservedly got her job because she is a woman but that Penati used her position to hire a less qualified candidate because of gender favoritism. The elephant in the room, of course, is whether that accusation has a factual basis—an impossible question to answer without inside knowledge... He undeniably had some solid data suggesting that hiring practices in STEM (in this case, physics) now favor women overall, at least at the faculty level; this is consistent with other recent research... Strumia’s talk challenged feminist claims that the gender imbalance in physics is due to sexism and offered alternative, “conservative” explanations rooted in biology: greater male variance in high-level mathematical ability, differences in interests, and the uneven distribution of “systemizing” traits. One may agree or disagree; but to suggest that such an argument is offensive and unacceptable is bizarre, given that studies reflecting this perspective—often authored by women—routinely appear in scientific journals. (When Strumia brought up the research of neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen, other workshop participants dismissed it as “discredited” and mocked it as “neurotrash”—which certainly doesn’t reflect the consensus view of Baron-Cohen’s work.) Unfortunately, Strumia also gave some ammunition to detractors... This case still has worrying implications for academic freedom—especially since the University of Pisa reprimand does not single out the personal issues but suggests more generally that Strumia’s public statements about “the effect of gender on competitions in certain scientific fields” violate the rules of “respect” and “responsible conduct.”... the anti-Strumia screed titled “Particles for Justice”—signed by over 1,600 researchers—made numerous questionable assertions, even misrepresenting some of the material it referenced. (It is telling that the author of the Areo critique, a high-energy researcher, chose anonymity due to career and social concerns.) Meanwhile, a report on the LiveScience website dismissed as “laughable” the claim that greater male variance in cognitive skills explains gender imbalances in physics—only to concede that it could well be a factor, though not sufficient to explain all the disparities. (Strumia never claimed it was.) On another science website, in a post entitled “Alessandro Strumia, The Mansplainer,” INFN/CERN physicist Tommaso Dorigo compared the denial of “woman discrimination in STEM” to the denial of “human-made global warming.” He also blasted Strumia as a disgruntled job-seeker prone to padding his citation count with “useless ambulance-chasing articles.” Even fellow CERN researcher Andrea Giammanco, who wrote his own blogpost highly critical of Strumia and his analysis, had some scathing words for attempts to portray him as “not that good a physicist.” Virtually none of Strumia’s critics made a genuine effort to engage with the data he presented... 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. Summers was defenestrated over a very measured talk suggesting that biological differences (along with cultural norms and entrenched sexism) might contribute to the underrepresentation of women in science and technology; he was also widely misrepresented as saying that women can’t do science. More recently, Cornell psychologist Wendy Williams spoke of an “outpouring of vitriol” in response to the 2015 study in which she and colleague Stephen Ceci found that women have an advantage in STEM hiring... British Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher Tim Hunt fell victim to a disgraceful public trashing over a misreported joke... Hunt—who had lost an honorary professorship at University College London and had been forced off the science committee of the European Research Council—was essentially vindicated. A belatedly discovered partial recording of his talk, published by the London Times, confirmed what his supporters had been saying: his remarks were clearly facetious and self-deprecating, were met with laughter (rather than “stony silence” as some had claimed), and were made in the context of praising women’s achievements. Yet no apologies were made, and none of the people who smeared Hunt were censured for far worse attacks than Strumia’s jab at his colleagues."
An Unhelpful Study about Women in Physics - "An article promoted by the American Physical Society (APS, the world’s largest organization of physicists) has claimed a recent study shows that “Yes, Sexual Harassment Still Drives Women Out of Physics.” Unfortunately, the study does not ascertain the severity of the harassment, who engages in harassment, and whether harassment gets more or less severe as people advance in the field. Moreover, the conclusion that harassment drives women from physics contradicts publicly available data on the progression of women in physics careers... If unwelcome behavior comes primarily from freshman classmates who improve as they progress in their studies, we should correct them, but also breathe a sigh of relief that the physics community is one in which most people improve. On the other hand, if misconduct comes primarily from senior people then we need systematic overhaul of a community in which the rot starts at the top and trickles down. The reality is almost certainly between those extremes, but the findings from this study do not tell us where to focus efforts most productively. Likewise, each item can encompass a range of behaviors by a range of people in a range of “physics settings.” For instance, the authors do not indicate if persistent attempts to ask someone out are mere annoyances or rise to the level of stalking behavior requiring law enforcement responses. We also don’t know if the persistent requests come from classmates in introductory courses, where many students aren’t even majoring in physics, i.e. a situation that may be less about physics in particular than about universities in general... Regarding item 3, what constitutes “suggesting people of your sex or gender are not as good at physics or math”? If people have literally said “Women can’t do physics” then they should apologize and change. On the other hand, suppose that a peer mentions arguments from James Damore’s controversial memo on gender gaps in STEM... Since even journalists with professional obligations to check printed statements against original sources mischaracterize Damore’s detailed, footnoted memo in this way, it is quite possible that a student would similarly misinterpret offhand summaries of such arguments... too many people have said “they’d never do this to a man” about things that routinely happen to men. For instance, a woman professor has lamented to me that a man delivered a soliloquy about how terrible his professors were when he took classes on her subject (at a different university), and suggested that everyone in her field should follow his suggestions for improvement. She took this to be a classic example of “mansplaining.” Alas, non-physicists—of both sexes!—routinely tell me (a cisgender male) what was wrong with their high school or college physics classes. What she regards as mansplaining, I experience as a daily occupational hazard... The authors also claim that their rather imprecise measures of harassment correlate with reductions in women students’ confidence and sense of belonging in the field. However, only some of the harassment items show statistically significant associations with students’ confidence and sense of belonging, and which harassment items show significant associations depends on what sorts of controls are included in the model. In one case, the sign of the effect even runs contrary to the hypothesis that harassment decreases confidence: Students who reported unwanted sexual attention are significantly more likely to believe that their success was due to ability rather than luck (though this effect disappears when more controls are included). Moreover, reported effects are weak, with the most severe reported harassment only shifting students’ reported attitudes by less than half a point on a 0–4 scale. These are all signs of a result that needs replication before we build policies around it. Finally, regarding the authors’ concern that harassment may drive women out of physics, there’s surprisingly little evidence of attrition of women from physics... In short, the proportion of women among physics professors in the US slightly exceeds the proportion of women among students completing PhDs in physics, which in turn matches the proportion of women among students entering graduate school and also among students completing undergraduate degrees in physics... Threat inflation will not help us focus resources appropriately, and may even backfire by scaring women away"
Peggy Sastre - Quand des féministes harcèlent des scientifiques - "« Pour le moment, je préfère rester anonyme. Je n'en suis pas fier, mais il faut que je mange et je suis aussi responsable des opportunités de recherche de mes étudiants et de mes postdocs. » L'astrophysicien qui me dit cela n'a tué personne, il vient simplement de me raconter qu'il a choisi de quitter l'Australie, le pays où il a été diplômé et où s'est déroulé le gros de sa carrière, pour la Chine. Pourquoi ? Parce que, en tant que chercheur, il s'y sent plus libre. C'est sans doute un comble, mais c'est la réalité. Pour de plus en plus de scientifiques, les pressions et la mise au pas du « politiquement correct » (faute de meilleure formule) au sein des universités et autres établissements de recherche sont telles que s'exiler dans un pays non démocratique, où les opposants disparaissent et les minorités religieuses sont parquées dans des camps de rééducation, devient un pis-aller si vous souhaitez travailler normalement... Nous sommes aujourd'hui (à peu près) tous d'accord : qu'il soit sexuel, scolaire, moral ou en Ligue du LOL, le harcèlement est un fléau à combattre. Mais le consensus est bien moins solide quand les individus persécutés, jusqu'à en perdre le goût de travailler ou de vivre, sont des scientifiques ostracisés pour « mauvaise pensée », indépendamment de l'intégrité, du sérieux et de la qualité de leurs travaux. Et ce, même lorsque les brimades reposent sur des cabales mensongères et diffamatoires. « Le climat politique dans les universités australiennes a effectivement été l'une des raisons principales de mon départ. C'est aujourd'hui très difficile d'obtenir un poste permanent si vous ne faites pas partie d'un groupe protégé (hélas, je suis un homme blanc, hétérosexuel et chrétien, pas de bol !) et/ou si vous ne faites pas suffisamment d'activisme visible (ou, du moins, de virtue signalling) pour un certain nombre de sujets chéris par la gauche écologiste », précise mon interlocuteur. « En Chine, il est très probable que des astronomes chinois subissent l'interférence politique du Parti communiste, mais, en tant qu'étranger, on me laisse tranquille. Je peux faire de l'astronomie en paix, sans perdre de temps sur des projets “diversitaires”. Ici, les postes sont toujours donnés aux meilleurs candidats, qu'importe leur sexe, leur genre ou leur origine ethnique. Et contrairement à mon patron australien, mon patron chinois ne m'a jamais reproché de ne pas être assez socialiste. » Comme ailleurs, les tracas qui ont poussé ce physicien à l'exil académique relèvent globalement d'une discrimination positive devenue folle. « Les degrés de discrimination sont nombreux », m'explique l'astrophysicien. « Déjà, il y a de plus en plus de postes, de bourses et de subventions qui sont officiellement réservés aux femmes et aux membres des “nations premières”. Ensuite, dans les postes ouverts aux hommes blancs, vous avez des clauses spéciales garantissant l'embauche de candidats d'un seul profil idéologique. Par exemple, on va vous demander de rédiger une “déclaration de diversité” [qui n'est rien d'autre qu'un serment d'allégeance] dans laquelle vous devrez détailler tout le “leadership” dont vous avez su témoigner dans vos recherches ou vos enseignements antérieurs (en organisant des séminaires ou des conférences réservées aux femmes, par exemple). »... apparaître nommément dans Le Point, publication jugée trop « à droite », équivaudrait à se tirer une balle dans le pied auprès de leurs collègues et étudiants... Janice Fiamengo, professeure de littérature anglaise à l'université d'Ottawa et par ailleurs spécialiste des attaques féministes contre la liberté d'expression, a suivi l'affaire Strumia depuis le début. Et elle n'est pas optimiste. Selon elle, la décision du Cern « envoie un signal évident à l'ensemble de la communauté scientifique : l'ère de l'investigation scientifique factuelle (qui a sans doute toujours été imparfaite et qui était en voie de disparition ces derniers temps) est réellement terminée. À partir d'aujourd'hui, tout scientifique saura qu'il doit s'assurer que tous ses déclarations, travaux et recherches sont approuvés par les féministes. Toute recherche portant sur des questions sociales contemporaines, et notamment celles liées au statut de la femme (mais aussi à la race, la religion et d'autres questions brûlantes), devra désormais confirmer les orthodoxies idéologiques de notre époque. À savoir : il n'y a pas de différence d'intérêts et d'aptitudes entre les populations ou les groupes, et toute inégalité de résultat est forcément la conséquence d'injustices généralisées et des discriminations que subissent les groupes sous-représentés. Même lorsqu'il existe des données factuelles démontrant que ces injustices et ces discriminations n'existent pas (voire que c'est en réalité le “groupe opprimé” qui est avantagé, comme dans la présentation de Strumia). À partir d'aujourd'hui, ces données devront être ignorées, niées et, encore mieux, conspuées ». « Le Cern vient d'annoncer qu'il prêtait allégeance à un groupe fanatique d'idéologues plutôt qu'aux impératifs d'une recherche fondée sur la vérité », résume Fiamengo, excédée. « C'est une chasse aux sorcières, purement et simplement, qui montre combien les nouveaux puritains ont réussi à percer jusque dans les sciences physiques, forteresse jadis imprenable. » Une dernière ironie de l'histoire pour la route ? C'est aussi à l'université de Pise que fut professeur un certain Galilée."
Activists Must Stop Harassing Scientists
