CERN describes physicist’s gender talk as ‘highly offensive’

01 Oct 2018 Hamish Johnston

Collision course: CERN has condemned a talk given by an Italian particle physicist. (Courtesy: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

UPDATE: CERN has suspended Alessandro Strumia from any activity at CERN with immediate effect, pending investigation into his presentation last week.

The CERN particle-physics laboratory in Geneva has described an invited talk given last week at the lab by an Italian physicist as “highly offensive”. The presentation was given on 28 September at an inaugural CERN workshop on high-energy theory and gender by Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa. In the talk, he claimed that men, not women, face discrimination when seeking jobs in physics.

Strumia is a theoretical physicist whose research interests include particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. He is not a CERN employee but has an office at the lab. He is listed as the principal investigator of a European Research Council grant that is hosted by CERN and runs until 2020.

Strumia’s presentation included graphs and tables that analyse the citation records of papers written by male and female physicists. In the talk, he stated that these data show that “top authors are man, man,…man”. He also claimed that data related to academic hiring show that women with fewer citations were being hired over men with greater numbers of citations.

Passed over

Indeed, in one slide, Strumia claimed that he was passed over for a job at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics, despite having many more citations than the successful female candidate.

Speaking to BBC Radio, Strumia said: “If you want to be hired, it’s easier to be a woman”.

The physicist Jess Wade from Imperial College London, who also spoke at the CERN workshop, told the BBC that Strumia’s presentation was “insulting” and based on “simplistic” ideas. Wade added that many of the women in the audience were early-career physicists on short-term contracts who rely on senior researchers like Strumia for their next job. She said it was “really frightening” that a person in a position of authority would give such a presentation.

CERN has removed a video of the presentation from its website along with Strumia’s slides. However, the slides are available on Google Drive.

Hamish Johnston is the general-physics editor of Physics World

8/10/2018 FROM PHYSICSWORLD.COM