Search Results: meeting new people

Professor Alessandro Strumia, of Pisa University, has been suspended with immediate effect from working with the European nuclear research centre CERN, pending an investigation, after giving a speech at a workshop in Geneva on gender and high energy physics where he told his audience of mostly female physicists that "physics was invented and built by men, it's not by invitation", and that his results "prove that physics is not sexist against women. However the truth does not matter, because it is part of a political battle coming from outside".

He produced a series of graphs which showed that women were hired over men whose research was cited more by other scientists in their publications, an indication of higher quality. He also presented data that showed that male and female researchers were equally cited at the start of their careers, but men scored progressively better as their careers progressed. Prof Strumia also pointed to behavioral research, citing a study which indicated that "men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people" and another suggesting that there was a "difference even in children before any social influence", saying that these conclusions may "not be fully right... (but) the opposite assumption of identical brains is ideology".

Unfortunately for Strumia though, Dr Jessica Wade, a physicist from Imperial College London, was at the meeting, and contacted BBC News to tell them how "really upsetting to those at the workshop," his speech was. "This man gets up, saying all this horrible stuff. I don't understand how such a forward thinking organisation like CERN, which does so much to promote diversity in research, could have invited him to speak to young people". When the BBC contacted Prof Strumia about his "highly offensive" speech, he said: "People say that physics is sexist, physics is racist. I made some simple checks and discovered that it wasn't, that it was becoming sexist against men and said so." What do you think?

I'm just wondering since I'm a guy who is soft-spoken, occasionally stutters when talking and is a bit shy in person (not shy enough to meet new people and give a very brief talk buy shy enough to be mostly reserved and not talk much about myself). The funny thing is, I'm an amateur boxer and have no fear of fighting anyone (even if the person has more experience and is bigger than me) but I still have some uneasy feelings of meeting and getting to know new people, especially if it's girls who I secretly find very attractive.