Thread by @jesswade

On Friday I spoke at a CERN workshop on gender and high energy physics. I shared the work of @PhysicsNews’ Juno Award, the @1752Group and other evidence-based institutional programs. The head of theory @CERN gave a 30 minute Damore-esque manifesto against #womeninSTEM.

https://twitter.com/sheydaipek/status/1046205301957976064

After my talk (indico.cern.ch/event/714346/c…), he told me British undergraduates faced huge debts after their studies because of the amount of money we spend on equality and diversity training. Apparently #womeninSTEM in Italy face no debts or sexism...

Short summary of Strumia’s talk: women aren’t as good at physics as men and they’ve been allocated too much funding/ been promoted into positions of power unfairly. He said this to an audience of early career #womeninSTEM.

He cites/ celebrates almost everyone you’d expect: Summers, Hunt, Baron-Cohen, Damore... and went on to speak about M+F IQs and ‘cultural Marxism’. He slides aren’t available online anymore. #womeninSTEM

Strumia is involved with hiring @cern, and said this to an audience almost exclusively full of ECR #womeninSTEM on short-term contracts. This isn’t right.

Also, I didn’t write this out for retweets or new followers. I’ll probably get in trouble for it and be asked to take it down. But no one in that audience can because their career directly depends on someone who thinks they’re there due to tokenism, and that makes me 🤬.

Just to confirm, he’s a big dog @CERN (has his own permanent office) but isn’t head of theory. He’s part of a big @ERC_Research grant, where he hires staff to the university of Pisa.

Oh, and, he came to watch/ comment on my 09:00 talk and left for the science talks of the young researchers afterward before returning to deliver his diatribe. That tells you everything you need to know about how this guy thinks..

When people in positions of power in academia behave like this and retain their status they don’t only push one generation of underrepresented groups out of science, but train others that it’s ok to propagate this ideology for years to come.

Ah! Now the right-wing string theory squad (with no academic affiliations) are coming in to defend him. Does that mean we're doing something right?

https://twitter.com/lumidek/status/1046435852489043970

The right wing who MAKE THEIR OWN WIKIPEDIA PAGES. Toby Young 101.🤦🏽‍♀️en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti…

Not sure why these people get away with it. I'm so careful in @Wikipedia editing. He wrote his own page and the other editors just say don't take it down because he is a 'nutjob'?