For a few days, in Italy there was the usual media bitch for a bad and inflated news. Dr. Francesca Gino was fired from the University of Harvard because he was accused of altering the data in some of his publications, to make the most convincing results appear. Since it is an Italian abroad, it was not possible for us to conceive that the dismissal was based on accurate investigations. Mostly it shouted at the plot: they eliminated it because it was uncomfortable. In what way a researcher could be uncomfortable who studied how creativity connects to dishonesty, I would like to know so much.

In order to support compatriots, anything invent is invented

Perhaps the doubt could come to us that an institution like Harvard, who had not fired a tenured teacher for forty years, had his good reasons; But no, since she is Italian, they fired her out. Better still: they fired it because now there is Trump who sends foreigners away. Too bad that Harvard is on course with Trump precisely for this reason, because foreigners do not want to send them away, and that the investigation started two years ago, when Biden was governed. Not to mention the fact that the doctor has double citizenship. But since she is Italian, rightly, our newspapers, rather than carefully bringing the facts carefully, have given space to her point of view, generating sympathy and support from readers. But above all, she is a woman; And a woman who is fired what else has to do if you don’t play the charter of gender discrimination? Which is almost taken as a basic assumption, now: whatever happens to a woman is because she is a woman, while a man would not have happened.

Being women is equivalent to being victims

It is a winning card, we know; Recently, the newly elected mayor of Merano, who refused to wear the tricolor band and then blamed it to the previous mayor, who would have been “provocative” (in asking her for a mandatory thing such as wearing the tricolor band), and therefore necessarily male chauvinist, has also been played. In the case of Dr. Gino, it would have been gender discrimination because Harvard would not have treated the men who found themselves in that situation in the same way. But Harvard replied that the accusations – very serious – towards the doctor led to a change in internal policies, because they were the first formal accusations of falsification or alteration of the data, after many years. So a more restrictive new policy was implemented because the case was particularly serious and the damage suffered by the university was therefore greater. It is not that there are exactly the extremes to talk about gender discrimination, which is very serious and serious that should not be pulled lightly.

The trivialization of serious issues

Not that I am, here, give reason or wrong to someone: there will be a process that will establish how the facts have gone, and if the doctor will show that the accusations are false, he will have justice. Rather I would like to point out how rationality is tended to completely lose depending on who the person interested is. When it is generally people we feel close, with whom we empathize, for us it is impossible that those people are guilty, who have made a mistake, is necessarily fault of the others and will jump out that in reality they are victims. Which can be true, but it is not clear why we should give it for sure from the beginning, without even worrying about truly understanding how things went.

But above all, the idea that something that many people really suffer, such as gender discrimination, is pulled out of random and almost taken for granted, is terrible: a serious lack of respect, a diminishing the importance of the theme by reducing it to a farce, a joker paper that is always valid.