Statement on the gender bias article

27 May 2008

Comments on the May 13th feature, Study exposes gender bias in High Energy Physics:

The article about gender issues in the ATLAS e-News of 13 May 2008 has produced strong reactions, and we wish to add here some clarifications. Note that the purpose of the article was to inform the community about a publically available article written by Sherry Towers on her claims of gender bias in D0, and also most importantly to take this as a trigger to promote discussions as to what measures ATLAS may take to avoid possible biases. Let us not forget that the ATLAS e-News are meant to be an informal forum where also individual opinions can be expressed, the e-News are not an official communication channel for Collaboration policy matters.

With this note we want to state very clearly that the ATLAS e-News article does not imply at all that ATLAS as Collaboration would share or endorse the conclusions of the article by Towers, they remain her own responsibility. In particular neither the ATLAS Collaboration Board Chair nor the ATLAS Management have any doubts that the important gender issue is given due consideration in the D0 Collaboration. Furthermore, we wish to point out that we feel very committed to a fair treatment of all ATLAS members, women and men. We are certainly not aiming at any concepts like the ‘productivity’ as postulated in Towers’s article as important criteria of assigning talks for conferences.

Peter Jenni (ATLAS Spokesperson)

Kerstin Jon-And (ATLAS Collaboration Board Chair)