SCIENTIST SUSPENDED FOR GENDER LECTURE

Officials at the world’s largest particle accelerator have suspended an Italian physicist pending an investigation of his “offensive” presentation on gender issues that raised new concerns about sexism in science.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Monday that Alessandro Strumia of the University of Pisa was out of line in his talk Friday for a seminar on “High Energy Theory and Gender.” The Geneva-area centre said it had no prior knowledge of the content of the presentation and cited its “attacks on individuals” as “unacceptable in any professional context.”

One slide read “Physics invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation.”

Laura Covi, who studies cosmology at Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, and was at the Friday seminar, said Strumia’s comments didn’t go over well.

“He was claiming that some of the positions women were getting, they’re getting ... with fewer ( journal) citations than men,” she said. “I’m not so sure his thesis was supported by the data.”

Covi acknowledged that some of the world’s most eminent physicists have been men, but said that was “mostly a historical bias” since men have been able to study physics longer than women.

She also said it wasn’t her experience that female physicists were able to land jobs with fewer journal publications than men.