> "Women scientists are harder to work with because if you criticize, they cry"

Let me fix the quote for you:

> "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry."

He was making an obvious joke about his love interest, not "women scientists".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hunt#The_toast

> In India, where I grew up, a person from a "lower" caste(not backed by financial standing, only birth status) is given a lower standard to clear to say becoming a doctor. Which only leads to bullshit doctors.

I'd like to see a credible source to this statement.

Ah! The classic "optimize for only and only productivity and nothing else" argument.

The purpose of living in society has many goals. One of them is to work in such a way to improve what and how we improve so we can have more wealth. But there are plenty of other goals. Such as not destroy the environment. And most importantly, to make people in society happier.

A coal power plant is not allowed to use low grade highly polluting coal because even if its cheaper to do so, the outcomes for society are worse with it than forcing the power plant owners to spend more money on more expensive coal. Its a reasonable restriction on what inanimate resources can be used by a corporation.

A university should be made to have better parity between genders. It might lower the scientific productivity of the university - evidence needed. But not doing so has the negative societal outcome of making a lot of people very very unhappy. Affirmative action is a reasonable restriction on what human resources can be used by a corporation.

If you have a historical system of imbalance (e.g.: caste system), and today we decide we're going to get rid of it, do you think it's just going to fix itself and everybody is suddenly equal? Even though all the people in power are from the upper caste, and the lower castes are uneducated, and poor?

It's not "blantantly idiotic"! I often think the way affirmative action is implemented is flawed, but at least it takes into account the momentum of the problem and tries to do something about it. It takes a long-term view of how equality might be achieved by propelling those up who wouldn't make it otherwise, to disrupt the infinite loop. In the short term those who are used to privilege find it a little harder (boo-hoo, you've tasted a little a tiny slice of what the other side has had... for centuries). It's for the long-term achievement of what you ostensibly support.

I agree with all your points up to the anecdote about India. Personally I have a big problem with the Indian caste system already, so yes, I am biased here. Without further details, especially the overall picture, in the last paragraph I get the impression that you are loathing someone of perceived lower standing to get things easier than you and maybe having more already. Not sure how I should understand that, either you are against castes and for treat people based on merit (not preferring the already rich) or you want to be treated based on some perceived social superiority. I cannot judge.

The irony is his rant like other recent controversial cases proves the bias they are arguing against. He has 'come out' but given his deep seated beliefs what are the chances a female receives fair and equal opportunity from 'professionals' like him?

If you believe in 'meritocracy' and rational behavior you can't suddenly 'choose' to ignore the real risk to women and their careers from men who hold such views. Even with a small proportion of such men and there is no way to tell the numbers, there is a huge risk women will be discouraged right at the start and face a possibly hostile environment.

Research and life is difficult enough and women will drop off or be discouraged. And this will then further feed sexists more data points to justify their positions making a neat cycle of discrimination and 'scientific data'. The large number of men who continue to defend these regressive and unscientific positions proves beyond doubt the huge risk women in professions continue to face with them in it.

>That could easily be the result of discrimination by professors, collaborators, reviewers, etc.

Your go-to analysis of this data is that there's a grand conspiracy of misogynistic discrimination? I'm finding it really hard to imagine anyone deciding not to cite a paper on the sole basis that they saw a female name in the authorship.

I'm not a fan of his talk, but I wanna be honest about its contents.

That's the kernels of coherency we can extract from his slides (found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...). In reality he literally argues "conservative theory vs cultural marxism." He reuses Damore's claim of "preferences" with a cite to a humanities paper from the 1800s (talk about a replication crisis), and uses this newish claim of σ=1.15 on an IQ distribution which is not faring well in peer review.

He does specifically try to argue that women are cited equally when they are listed contributors. This argument is of course plagued by historical evidence he doesn't really care to refute, let alone address.

CERN is the last place for discussing these kind of social issues which are only going to cause furor.

They should well and indeed be studied, but not there.

Also, it's a really hard one. Biases abound.

Folks are passing the slides, which don't actually have data (EDIT: supportive of his preference or σ=1.15 arguments, he does summarize and offer a bit of data about how women claim to be marginalized in the field). Folks there say the slides are not reflective of quite how angry and off-putting the talk was. It was not presented calmly.

Here are the slides:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...

WARNING: These slides are not very good or compelling and invoke, "Cultural Marxism" as a causal agent for why women want to and feel entitled to a fair shot at STEM positions by merit.

You can be modestly sure anyone who says, "Cultural Marxism" (a direct invocation of the specter of Nazi propagandists' "cultural bolshevism") isn't arguing with the best of intentions. Folks invoking that nonsensical saw aren't about to present a huge quantity of well sourced and organized evidence.

Usually that phrase is associated with statistics about the number of Jewish investors in the US, how CoCs are destroying culture, how dangerous Muslims are to "European cultures," or how women and socialism caused the fall of the Roman empire.

Judging by timestamps that thread was actually later... just upvoted more.

People are openly getting chosen for jobs on the basis of their gender or race, and that's 'disgusting'.

That said, CERN shouldn't be the place for this kind of discussion. Though it should be happening somewhere.

You are right. And I am not sure why you are getting down voted. As stated in the article, CERN distanced itself from these statements. An another physicist present during the presentation consiedered the conclusion superficial.

If so, looks pointed (especially some cartoons) but information is mostly reasonable. Valid point is: "Quotas in only the best jobs is not equality"

I'm OK with him arguing against the norm.

The least I expect from him is to not use terms based on conspiracy theories in his slides.

This implies that statements can be disproven on a scientific basis. Sometimes we don't have the metrics, and we gather them too late. Sometimes statistics can be interpreted either way.

Look at the IQ-bias in non-western countries. Racists take it to mean that people are less 'smart' in non-western countries, the scientists working in the field have a number of opinions, from considering it a cultural bias on part of the test, to considering the bias to be correctible, and a problem created by poor material circumstances such as poverty, lack of nutrition, and inadequate education.

The problem with the former, is that because the test itself is the metric, you can't 'prove' that it is biased. Are these people less intelligent, or is the test at fault? We need to devise another test to see if we can correct for the bias. But wait, that means that the second test might be biased towards non-western cultures! Societal bias in general becomes ridiculously fiddly and difficult to prove either way, simply because there are so many different places in the process where something can go wrong. From the test itself, to the pruning of the numbers, to the slice of the community selected for the tests (historically 'gender difference' studies have had such small -- and inequal test groups that they are laughable), and so on -- all can have bias. It is to some degree impossible to prove whether your test is biased or if the bias is in culture, because cultural bias can lead to material effects. How do you isolate for how the researchers treat the subjects? Are women being driven out by lack of skill, or because the male-domination of the environment has led to an inhospitable culture. How do you test for that in the first place? Etc. There are much too many variables to make it a 'simple' job.

>What I expected to happen: Presentation's veracity is disproven on a scientific basis.

This was a physics related thing, do you want the physicists to start now studying social issues? Next you want the physicists to tackle climate change and flat earth deniers.

If there is a discussion to be had then the people with the skills in that domain, social studies, statistics(I am not sure who exactly are qualified too make good studies) should have those discussions.