In 2018 I presented scientific results at a conference about gender at CERN, but CERN cancelled my presentation.  

Hoping to clarify the issue scientifically, I then posted to the US preprint bulletin arXiv a scientific paper with details of my analysis, but arXiv blocked my preprint.  

My results have now been published on the scientific journal Quantitative Science Studies after the usual refereeing process.  In this way, I learnt that results similar to mine had been obtained in many previous papers, that had been ignored at the CERN conference, where only one point of view was discussed.  Furthermore, my data have been made fully public and the journal accepted commentaries, opening a free debate. Some commentaries raised scientific doubts, that were clarified in my published reply, confirming all results.  Here is the full paper in a single file. 

 I am now the only speaker of the CERN conference who got results published. It’s reassuring that a journal followed the normal scientific practice instead of failing to cancel culture.  I submitted my published paper to the preprint server arXiv, that rejected it with the only motivation that it “is on a topic not covered by arXiv or that the intended audience for your work is not a community we currently serve”, while accepting politically-correct but scientifically-incorrect preprints on the same topic, including a heated reply to my paper by Ball et al.   Furthermore, arXiv accepted a bibliometric paper by prof. Kormendy, who soon had to withdraw it writing a Maoist apology: this new case worried physicists who cannot imagine how Kormendy offended the delicate feelings of the activists that attacked him.

Many will keep criticizing my paper (often getting its content wrong, sometimes even its title wrong). But the  surrounding controversy is mostly outside science, where the issue of gender differences in STEM is basically understood.   I thank colleagues who shared their expertise in relevant topics of biology and psychology, helping me to realize that gender differences in interests and Higher Male Variability is not discredited science (see this paper for a recent review).  

Instead, there is an industry of activists who work on media to paint real science as discredited and their ideology as science. In these years increasingly more scientific publications and scientists have been cancelled.  

The surrounding debate is so toxic and dangerous because science conflicts with the ideology behind identity politics. As discussed in the books by Pluckrose and Lindsay, by Saad and by others, scientific institutions are giving up to an illiberal ideology that denies objectivity, rejects the scientific method, the principle of non-discrimination, meritocracy, individuality, liberal universalism, free speech, and confuses scholarship with activism.