Cern scientist says "men are discriminated against in physics'

Not even equal thought probably.

Even being allowed to look in the door is an affront!

To the privileged, equal treatment feels like oppression

So for any girl thinking about it who loves the subject I would say go for it but your maths needs to be shit hot as well as your imagination otherwise it is going to be pretty awful!

A side track there but I feel quite passionately about it.

This prof can go fuck himself

Cern statement (which sounds like it's changed from earlier as PP described as weak):

"On Monday, 1 October, CERN suspended the scientist from any activity at CERN with immediate effect, pending investigation into last week’s event."

That's more like it.

I've got a degree in physics from the 90s and I did not feel (or didn't notice ) any bias from the teachers etc but to be fair I was out clubbing and on the piss the whole time so probably wouldn't have noticed

My fellow students were a great bunch. It was kind of an all geeks (nerds?) together vibe more than girls / boys IYSWIM.

I really enjoyed the course and it's a subject I still am drawn to > and share with the kids. Lots of it is very accessible (in the "stories" as it were, the maths is a bit of a bastard!) and the kids enjoy hearing stuff about stars / planets / atoms / etc.

I don't work in it BUT I think that having Physics BSc on your CV is a sign that you are clever & if you're a woman it's a real conversation starter in job interviews as it's quite unusual I suppose

I love all the hardcore STEM FWR ‘lady posters’ congregating on this thread. You rock!

Also Jocelyn Bell Burnell . It’s not unheard of for men to take credit for clever female physicists work.

Oi! As a theoretical physicist of a "certain vintage" I object. ( Actually you're probably right.)

Though number of citations is a pretty standard measure of reputation and achievement in science (and one of my female colleagues is lead author on the most-cited paper ever in our particular sub-field ).

@CritEqual the reddit link at the start of the thread has the full slideshow.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45709205

Suspended - seems they're taking it a bit more seriously

What rubbish. It seems to me that this person, who is young by the standards of Italian academia but I think old for theoretical physics (b 1969 according to Wikipedia) is very concerned about 'reputation', since he made an algorithm to 'measure' citations.

However in other news (and with exquisite timing):
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45655151

What worries me is I'm finding it quite hard to track down the actual case he's making. Given that we're talking about science here excommunicating someone for heresy is more the approach of a religion than a science.

so it should be only for men because women came late to the party. Nice to see how the small detail that women were deliberately kept put of the party by misogynistic men quite eludes him. First they piss on us and then they complain that we stink!!!!

(And yes again NAMALT. Don't burst a vein.)

I'm stating from memory so treat it as a ballpark estimate but something like 70% or more professorships are held by men, and physics is STILL tilted towards males, so I'm struggling to see a bias against males. Not read a full transcript of his presentation so unless he's made a more nuanced argument than has been reported it seems he is wrong.

Does he bring up GMVH at all does anyone know?

Echo opinions of jess, and just to add that I have worked in industrial research for many years. Women are few are far between, and we tend to get grouped together because once a manager has got a women on their team they typically want more of us.lack of Numbers of female physics/maths/computing graduate coming through the university system is considered a real problem.

Adam Rutherford was on radio 4 yesterday saying that physicists shouldn’t try to do biology ... there is no evidence at all that men’s and women’s brains differ to any material extent.
That knobber Toby Young has naturally got hold of this ... just lols at him attempting to comment on anything to do with the human brain. You can’t comment on what you haven’t got, poor old tobes

Such disgusting behaviour from him!

rememberatime, please don't worry about your daughter wanting to pursue Physics. I graduated just over a year ago with an MSci in Physics and now work as a physicist in the nuclear industry.

The reality is, we sometimes come across people with these sorts of views and the first time it happens, it's hard not to take it personally. It just needs a strong belief in your own ability to know they are wrong!

In my experience, the people who make comments like this are people who have been rejected from jobs they wanted and are convinced it's because of positive discrimination. I was asked at my assessment centre by one of the other candidates how I felt that I was more likely to get the job because I'm a girl - in the end he didn't get the job and I did! I then asked the person who interviewed me (who I now work with) and he said they undertook training before the interview on making sure they don't discriminate (positively or otherwise) and they had a conversation before giving me the job to make sure they weren't positively discriminating - that they genuinely thought I was best for the job!

The people I've come across that matter generally don't have these opinions, e.g. staff at uni and managers at work and I can honestly say from my experience that the people with these views are in the minority and institutions and companies will not accept it! Just make sure she has the confidence in her own ability, to know that she'll succeed because of her ability, not gender.

Emmy Noether, mathematician, physicist, and early invader of men's swimming pools. Her mediocre male peers who got positive discrimination by being allowed to matriculate and being treated like full humans have contributed nothing to physics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women%27s_education

Given that he used false slides to deceive the organisers, why didn't the chair stop his presentation once it became obvious what he'd done?

Anyone who thinks women can't do physics: two words, Marie Curie.

Women were banned from attending uni for centuries and were kept to a minority by quotas until fifty or so years ago. That's why "men made physics": they actually barred us from involvement.

Someone with more time should fill in the blanks for him and complete the slides, you know

"Men invented physics" on paper in the minds of some sexists because women were forcibly stopped from becoming involved in the education establishment or any task rewarded by status or money actually. Some changed their names to publish books as men and so on to get around this but that didn't become public knowledge until much much later.

That's also true, but it's soured what should have been a positive event.

It is worth noting however, that no-platforming works both ways.

If we don't hear these views, they are never exposed.

In some ways it has does women in STEM a favour and warned them of the man to avoid in the future.

I don't believe for a second that they didn't know what he was going to talk about. And I don't believe he'll face any further actions. He'll just be reminded to keep that sort of talk to amongst the men in future.

press.cern/press-releases/2018/09/statement-cern-stands-diversity

I don't understand why he was even allowed to speak at this event, given the organisers had his slides beforehand?