The Cern sexism row shows that even scientists can’t talk about gender

The great Quentin Blake, who illustrated the Roald Dahl books, has come up with some charming new illustrations for Matilda, the child prodigy who was so brainy she could make things move by sheer mind-power. For the 30^th anniversary of the book, he speculates on what she might have become: there’s Matilda, world traveller, chief executive of the British Library, astrophysicist.

Or maybe not. Alessandro Strumia at the university of Pisa has cast doubt on that last one. In an address at Cern, the European nuclear energy body, to an audience of women – grown up Matildas, all of them – he declared that the reason men are so over-represented in physics is because they are “over-performing” and that physics was “invented and built by men”. And in case they missed the point, he declared that women have been “allocated too much funding” and been “promoted into positions of power unfairly”. He concluded that “physics is not sexist against women.