CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk

Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by orbifold on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @04:39AM (#18119773)

I think he had personal reasons for giving this talk. He links to a presentation given by Anna Ceresole (http://www.weizmann.ac.il/stringuniverse/sites/stringunivers...) at the latest STRINGS conference in 2018 on gender equality. In that presentation they explain how they created a European Network of female string theory researchers (virtually unknown to me, never seen a paper by them, whereas in the US there are a lot of very good female string theorists Cvetic, Silverman etc.) with the explicit goal of increasing the number of females in permanent positions. The chair of that EU funded network Silvia Penati apparently hired Anna Ceresole for a professorship that Allessandro Strumia also applied for.

There is a stark difference in the number of citations Ceresole (~3000) and Strumia (~30000) have, and Strumia has roughly double the number of first author papers. So on the face of it this seems like a very bad case of unfair / biased hiring practice.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by Confusion on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @04:52AM (#18119841)

Only if you think hiring decisions should depend only on certain measurable professional qualifications. Which they of course never are. If someone has a specialization that you already have in your portfolio, while a competitor has a different specialization that would be an addition, then the competitor can be preferred. If someone is a loner while the competitor is a teamplayer, then the competitor can be preferred. Etc. Maybe he just behaved like an a* during the hiring procedure, taking for granted he would be hired. You don't know and any conclusion based purely on the numbers is unwarranted and premature.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by orbifold on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @05:02AM (#18119888)

I think it is unethical to hire someone, if you are both part of a special interest network of any kind. If you compare their citation record on (http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Ceresole.1 and http://inspirehep.net/author/profile/A.Strumia.1), there is really little contest who should be hired though (both work in high energy physics, Ceresole more on theory, Strumia on phenomenology). But yes I agree there are many factors that play into the hiring decision we can't know about. In any case it seems most likely that this was his primary motivation.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by manicdee on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @10:27PM (#18127226)

One of the points under contention is the lower rate of citation of women in any field. Thus using number of citations is a sexist metric and amounts to little more than dick waving.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by kork__ on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @05:10AM (#18119926)

And Rosa Parks primary motivation was that she was black and denied a seat.

Since when does motivation make someones point invalid?

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by orbifold on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @06:15AM (#18120228)

I don’t really care either way. There are quite a few very good female string theorists, who presumably got through the hiring process without any affirmative action. High energy physics is a very competitive field you just can’t afford to hire less than excellent people if you want to stay relevant.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by kork__ on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @06:28AM (#18120273)

High energy physics is a dead end field where people impress each other with how intelligent they are by producing ever more unverifiable results.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by iguy on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @05:29AM (#18120022)

Without expressing any opinion on who should have been hired here, some relevant facts:

> number of citations

Note that they're in slightly different fields, so that in addition to reservations about simple counting, you might expect different numbers anyway.

> the number of first author papers

This means nothing -- both lists are alphabetical.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by wrc49 on Sunday October 07, 2018 @02:32AM (#18159141)

Yes, but there is a more embarrassing detail that's missing from Strumia's talk:

Ceresole does not have a SINGLE refereed publication since 2014, and the one from 2014 is not exactly in the best journal. And that wasn't because of a career break. According to her CV she has been the Coordinator of the INFN Theory Group in Torino since 2015.

It is hard to believe that she could have been hired for any position in 2018 without a henchman (or henchwoman) on the committee. So the question arises whether someone close to her pushed her application. Then we know about the close association with Penati through a European COST action. Now what should have happened in such a case is that INFN's anti-corruption code should have been followed. I won't discuss the implications any further, and only say that all hell may break loose if there was something fishy about this hiring. Read the INFN code for yourselves, and consider that Italian academics are civil servants, so that a case of corruption would constitute a felony under the penal code. I wouldn't get into a fight for affirmative action over this case. It could backfire terribly.

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Re:CERN suspends physicist after his science-and-gender talk by truculent on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @05:14AM (#18119948)

It's a good job we don't base hiring decisions on something as simplistic as # of citations then, isn't it?

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