Strumia clearly did mislead CERN and the workshop organizers, pretty clearly gave a presentation to troll the workshop, and clearly launched an attack on another scientist (present at the workshop) during his presentation.
Is your argument that someone should have been able to give a contrarian presentation about gender disparities in physics at this workshop? I agree with you. But that's not what Strumia did. He tried to pwn the libs, and ended up depantsing himself.
His dismissal is not an objective nature of the inherent 'offensiveness' of the presentation.
This was not something that came from within, this was forced from the outside namely the media, in this case, BBC which made it politically problematic for CERN.
If a woman or man had launched an attack on the problems of being a woman in a male-dominated field nothing would have happened, in fact, he or she would have been applauded for speaking truth to power and celebrated for their courage they certainly wouldn't have ended up being called sexist or wouldn't have their ties cut.
You might as well chose to read him in the same manner, he certainly did think of himself as someone who spoke truth to power.
And it certainly wasn't something that was a bigger problem than someone could say. "What an idiot" and then move on.
But no, this had to be a question of sexism even though he was talking about discrimination against men.
This has James Damore deja vu all over it.
The code of Conduct hail mary is an excuse which is why their apology is not an argument it highlights the very problem.
There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. How do you imagine the BBC found out about it?
That's a measure of how afraid CERN is of the reaction to it. It's a matter of PR and has nothing to do with Science.
Anyone who's offended by some data in slides might consider not being a scientist. Or rather just easily debunking it if that's the case.
The data in the presentation is uncomfortable, and maybe it's all utterly misrepresented, but these things have a place in polite society.
Finally, here's this juicy tidbit: he's making a case that men are discriminated against in Science. He's given many examples. Then - he's fired right away for highlighting the fact that he's ostensibly being discriminated against? I wonder if that makes a sneaky, upside down lawsuit.
I don't think CERN is the place for any of this, but there should be a place for it somewhere reasonable where people can talk about reality without losing their jobs.
I don't think we need raging bigots, but we need contrarians.