Cern-sorship

Following the lynchings in recent years of Harvard President Larry Summers and Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt for off-message opinions about women scientists, the University of Pisa’s Prof Alessandro Strumia has been thrown to the wolves. Without a discernable trace of irony, Fabiola Gianotti, CERN’S female director-general, sacked the highflying academic for telling a seminar on gender issues in physics that women scientists are not really underrepresented at senior level.

He had been reacting to the usual litany of self-serving whinges from the seminar’s female participants and argued against positive discrimination for anyone, including women scientists, as it gives recipients a sense of entitlement. What bothers me isn’t whether he’s right or wrong, it’s the fact men cannot raise the subject at all. Clearly CERN suffers from the censorious mentality that believes any question about gender/ achievement has only one acceptable answer.

(REV DR) JOHN CAMERON

Howard Place, St Andrews