Scientist says ‘physics was invented and built by men’

A senior scientist has given what has been described as a “highly offensive” presentation about the role of women in physics. At a workshop organised by CERN, Professor Alessandro Strumia of Italy’s University of Pisa said that “physics was invented and built by men, it’s not by invitation”, writes Pallab Ghosh for the BBC News.

He said male scientists were being discriminated against because of ideology rather than merit. He was speaking at a workshop in Geneva in Switzerland on gender and high energy physics. Strumia has since defended his comments, saying he was only presenting the facts. But CERN, the European nuclear research centre, described Strumia’s presentation as “highly offensive”.

The centre, which discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012, has removed slides used in the talk from its website “in line with a code of conduct that does not tolerate personal attacks and insults”. Strumia told his audience of young, predominantly female physicists that his results “proved” that "physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside”.
Full report on the BBC News site