Physicist sparks gender row after claiming women are worse at physics

Since publication of this story, CERN has suspended Alessandro Strumia from any activities, pending an investigation.

A physicist speaking at CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, has sparked outrage after claiming that women are less capable of physics research.

Alessandro Strumia at the University of Pisa, Italy, was speaking to an audience of women beginning their careers in science at a CERN workshop on gender and high energy physics. He gave a talk claiming that the reason men are so over-represented in the field of physics is because they are “over-performing”, and that physics was “invented and built by men”.

Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who attended the talk, tweeted that Strumia also claimed that women have “been allocated too much funding” and been “promoted into positions of power unfairly”. He mentioned people such as Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University who resigned in 2006 after making similar comments.

Strumia’s conclusion: “Physics is not sexist against women. However truth does not matter.”

His claims have been widely condemned. CERN has released a statement describing his talk as “highly offensive”.

“CERN is a place where everyone is welcome, and all have the same opportunities, regardless of ethnicity, beliefs, gender or sexual orientation,” the statement continued.

“When looking at the history of science, it’s easy to imagine that the absence of women was women’s fault,” says Angela Saini, author of Inferior: How science got women wrong. “In reality, until well into the 20th century, women were deliberately excluded by men from universities and institutions, denied degrees, honours, even their names on papers.”

“When anyone suggests women have less aptitude, what they’re doing is trying to resurrect the sexism of the past, to reverse the clock back to when women had even fewer rights and opportunities, when they were believed to be intellectually inferior. It’s cowardly and inexcusable.”

This incident is the latest of many in the world of science and technology. Last year, for instance, an engineer at Google made similar claims.

Strumia had not replied to New Scientist’s request for comment at time of publication.