The pressure brought to bear by Diversity-Inclusion-Equity bureaucrats to extend their beach-head into the sciences is enormous.
Recently, there has been push-back by one of the bastions of science and technology: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) just removed displayed pronouns from over one hundred employees’ IDs that were part of the “Pronoun Project.”
What is the Pronoun Project? Internet sleuthing leads to several groups attempting to force everyone to identify by sexual preferences. For example, this project is supported by Gender Spectrum, Trans Lifeline, and Equality Texas. Here is a snippet of the Pronoun Project’s goals:
It’s time for us to evolve alongside consumers. And we believe that change can start with a simple question: What are your pronouns?By allowing people to represent themselves authentically, we can establish a real and personal connection between brands and consumers. Respect. Right from the start.And that doesn’t just empower the end user. It opens the doors for all of us to rethink the role of gender in advertising. How we understand and use it. How we portray it in our design, strategy and creative.
The team at GSFC decided that focusing on personal issues rather than calculations, schematics, and other essential science-based activities were distracting.
Yet, Scientific American has issues with this decision. The author, Nadia Drake, asserts that NASA was criticized for this decision, then delves into accusations of homophobia at the agency.
“Unfortunately, this is very consistent with my experience there,” says Beck Strauss, a former National Institute of Standards and Technology research scientist working at GSFC and a current member of the International Society of Nonbinary Scientists. “There are a lot of individuals working at NASA and related organizations who really, genuinely want things to be better and want to put their pronouns in their display names and want to make these places more welcoming for people from a lot of different backgrounds and identity groups. But those efforts always fail if they do not have administrative support and access to material resources.”Recently, NASA has taken steps to fight bias and increase diversity and equity within the agency, including providing gender-neutral bathrooms, instituting dual-anonymous peer review and removing due dates for some project proposals during the COVID pandemic. But the agency’s decision to terminate the GSFC pronoun test also comes on the heels of its refusal to rename the James Webb Space Telescope, a controversy that erupted when astronomers pointed out that the flagship’s namesake—a former NASA administrator—had allegedly been complicit in federal homophobic policies toward government workers in the 1950s and 1960s. And it comes amid a volley of legislation and directives in multiple states that are designed to marginalize and restrict the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
Cherry-picking NASA staff to quote hardly makes for a complete data set. A more robust assessment of comments shows regular Americans support NASA’s decision.
NASA was not designed to be a social justice organization. Its mission is to:
— Explore, use, and enable the development of space for human enterprise– Advance scientific knowledge and understanding of the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe and use the environment of space for research– Research, develop, verify, and transfer advanced aeronautics, space, and related technologies
Promoting the latest equity trend is not listed.
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