Physicist delivers non-PC talk at CERN and gets booted

The latest round in the culture wars in science. The BBC reports on an Italian physicist who managed to ignite a controversy at CERN. Dr. Alessandro Strumia of Pisa University showed up at the "1st Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender" and delivered a presentation that was probably the exact opposite of what the organizers expected.

Instead of claiming that there are systematic barriers to the success of women in physics, the professor began by presenting the results of some of his data analysis.

First, he showed a chart of female representation in different fields, hilighting the complete dominance of women in disciplines like Education and Psychology:

Next, he showed a chart of female representation in STEM fields in the context of gender equality metrics for different countries:

He went on to provide evidence for a few claims, drawing upon the available research databases that I presume to be used by the physics community:

• There is no gender preference with respect to citations in any category at any time.
• There are fewer women at the top of the citation distribution.
• On average women are hired with fewer citations than men.
• Women are  hired earlier in their careers than men with similar biblio-metric.

After these claims, he continued his talk with a small list of points showing that men in general are disadvantaged in society:

• Oxford giving female STEM students extra time on exams.
• Melbourne reserving job openings for female applicants only.
• Forced or compulsory labor restricted to males, according to international conventions.

He then presented a graph showing different distributions in male and female IQ tests, implying that there is a wider range of variability for males. This, I believe, is the Larry Summers hypothesis that saw Larry kicked out of his position.

There's a lot more in his slide deck, which is admittedly disjointed and hasty.

At a high level, I'd say he made a major error by not confining his talk to the discussion of evidence. Presenting the evidence about trends in citation networks, fully discussing his methodology, and asking for feedback would have been a much more effective way to proceed. Instead, he threw the entire kitchen sink into the process, including what appears to be a personal grievance about not being hired for a job.

In a sense he reminds me a bit of James Damore, who, although blessed with extremely rare analytical abilities, failed to take into account the audience that might be reading his work. Many of Damore's points were reasonable, but he should have realized that there is a core group of left wing ideologues who enjoy chasing down dissenters from left-liberal orthodoxy.

To be clear, I make no claims about gender discrimination in STEM. My interest is in the reaction of the establishment to dissenting views.

In these circumstances, one has to be very careful about how differing opinions can be presented. The current political climate is somewhat reminiscent of totalitarian societies, in which any form of deviation from official dogma can be cause for punishment or isolation. There are ways to chip away at the power of the commissariat, but any such action has to be laser-accurate.

Professor Strumia delivered a winding, unfocused presentation that left plenty of material to be used against him. In fact, it is not inaccurate to say that he veered from scientific analysis into activism; as a white male (lowest on the totem pole) that is likely not a winning strategy unless you are at the end of your career and have no further use for your job.

If I were the Chinese government, I would be studying the trends in western science education closely. There is a tremendous amount of talent that is going to be shut out of the tenure track process if the 'diversity' and 'inclusion' initiatives push ahead. Not only will males of Chinese descent face a more difficult time (as they are already experiencing in Silicon Valley, having been turfed from the 'minority' club), but there will be a large number of males of European descent who would probably be happy to head to Tsinghua or other Chinese schools to get away from the left wing lunacy.

UPDATE: It looks like the left wing witch hunters have convinced the University of Pisa to open an investigation.