NSF and Women in STEM: Removing Barriers or Chartering Jets?

 

Anyone even remotely connected with the academic world knows that the Trump administration has recently been playing Attila the Hun to the Italy of the government-funded research establishment, slashing billions in already-granted money, firing staff, and generally raising Hades.  A recent article by Andrew Follett in National Review highlights the shakeup at what many academics consider to be the crown jewel of such funding, the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF).  Follett points out that the long-established woke-diversity-equity-inclusion slant at the agency may be repressed for the moment, but making permanent changes will require Congressional action. 

 

Follett may well be right regarding the correct political strategy, but what I would like to focus on is one particular goal which the NSF holds dear to its bureaucratic heart:  expanding participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) for women. 

 

It is not quite the case, as Follett says it is, that NSF is abandoning this goal completely.  Rather, according to some updated guidelines on the NSF website, investigators may pursue it, but only "as part of broad engagement activities" that are open to all Americans, regardless of sex, race, or other "protected characteristics."  Even if Congress gets involved, I suspect NSF will keep doing what it wants to do while staying within the letter of the law, because I've seen up close how they do it in the case of a specific grant aimed at increasing the participation of women in engineering.

 

I state categorically that women should not be barred from pursuing degrees or jobs in engineering, either de jure or de facto.  As recently as 1970, women were not admitted to many all-male engineering-intensive schools, and many engineering programs at coed universities refused to take women.  Accordingly, the U. S. Dept. of Labor reports that only 3% of engineers were women that year.  Second-wave feminism, equal-employment laws, and other societal changes knocked down virtually all the legal and cultural barriers that kept women from being engineers by around 1990, and the percentage of engineers in the U. S. who were women rose to around 16%, where it has hovered to this day. 

 

But since 1990, NSF has expended probably a total of billions of dollars trying to raise that percentage above 16%, with the presumed goal being "equity":  that is, a percentage of women in engineering equal to their percentage in the general population.  We can say several things about these efforts.

 

The most obvious thing is, they have failed.  If NSF had poured billions of dollars into a pure-science project—just to take one at random, say, the nature of ball lightning—and gotten precisely zip results by now, one would hope that common sense would prevail and they would turn their attention to other matters.  But that is not how these things work.  This is not to say that all the money was wasted.  In a grant I was familiar with at my own university, special scholarships and academic support networks were set up in a way that mainly attracted women, although when I asked the principal investigator whether a male student could apply, she said technically yes, although they weren't getting any to speak of.  And scholarships are good for students, other things being equal. 

 

But in terms of NSF's original goals of funding science research that otherwise would not get done, paying for scholarships that are legally for everybody but (wink-wink) are really focused on women is a classic example of politics corrupting science.

 

I use the word "corrupting" deliberately, in the sense that betrayal of an agency's stated purpose for political reasons—any political reasons, right, left, or slantwise—is a step down a long road that led to distinctions such as "Aryan science" in Germany before World War II. 

 

As a wise junior-high civics teacher once told me, politics is just the conduct of public affairs, and of course it's not possible to keep any human institution, let alone a governmental one, completely free of political considerations. 

 

But as in so many other ethical situations, the intent is the key.  If Congress manipulates an agency's budget to favor certain regions, there's not much the agency's director can do about it other than jawbone.  But that is vastly different from setting up entire divisions directed not at the discovery of new knowledge, but at the changing of certain demographic statistics such as the percentage of women in engineering. 

 

It is entirely possible, but in the nature of things it cannot be proved, that about as many women as want to go into engineering today presently do so.  As we said, most legal barriers that kept women out of engineering were gone by 1990, and since then the two professions that are even more prestigious than engineering—law and medicine—have become thoroughly feminized.  And the stereotypical engineering image has changed radically from the 1940s, when a clipart drawing of an engineer would depict a rugged guy wearing work boots and toting a transit tripod on one shoulder and a big hammer in his hand.  Nowadays, your typical engineer does exactly what I'm doing now—sits at a computer, something that women and men can do equally well. 

 

I agree with Follett that the NSF, along with other federal agencies, will require extensive Congressional action and supervision in order for it to reorient its intentions and priorities.  Old habits die hard, and old bureaucrats die harder.  But some such sea change may be necessary if we are to avoid a wholesale turn away from government support of science research, which from the 1940s up to at least the 1990s enjoyed the benign support of most citizens.  In a democracy, if most people no longer want a thing done by the government, it shouldn't be done, generally speaking.  And if the science establishment has betrayed its origins and allowed itself to be corrupted by political winds that inevitably go out of fashion, the day of reckoning we are currently seeing the dawn of may go on longer than we think. 

 

I'm glad there are women in engineering.  I miss them when I don't have any in my undergraduate class, which happened last semester.  But I think it's time NSF quit trying to move political needles and go back to funding science.

 

Sources:  Andrew Follett's article "How Republicans Can Actually Defund Woke Science" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/05/how-republicans-can-actually-defund-woke-science/.  I also referred to the Dept. of Labor site at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/occupations-stem for women-in-engineering statistics, and the NSF website https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities for their updated priorities. 

Engineering Exemplar: Smarter Every Day's Destin Sandlin

An exemplar is an excellent model of something.  Engineering has its exemplars—people who excel at their work so well that it's worthwhile to point them out as good examples.  The aerospace engineer Destin Sandlin is an exemplar in a corner of engineering we don't think much about:  explaining engineering and science concepts to the general public.  Believe it or not, some of the ethics codes of engineering societies call for their members to do this.  Members of the IEEE (which used to stand for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers before they changed it to just the initials) are committed "to improve the understanding of technology; its appropriate application, and potential consequences." One engineer who is doing a lot in that direction right now is Destin Sandlin.

Mr. Sandlin has a graduate degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama at Huntsville and works as a missile flight test engineer at the Redstone Arsenal.  Some time in the late 2000s, he posted a video on YouTube showing his friends how to light a bonfire with rockets.  They liked it so much that he started making more videos.  It's now a collection of videos he calls Smarter Every Day.  He's now up to No. 142, at least, and now has over two million subscribers and 24 videos that have received more than a million views each. 

What does he talk about?  All kinds of cool stuff involving technology, explained in a visually appealing way with well-produced graphics and a narration by Mr. Sandlin himself.  He is the opposite of the stereotypical inarticulate nerdy engineer, as you might expect from someone who won the University of Alabama's Outstanding Senior Award.  (Notice that's not Outstanding Engineering Major, but Outstanding Senior—period.)  I discovered his videos while searching for high-speed photography videos, and came upon one that dealt with a thing called a Prince Rupert's drop.  Go look at it to find out what it is—it has to do with dropping very hot glass into cold water.  I was impressed by his combination of clarity, technical correctness, and enthusiasm.  Plus which, he shows some really neat high-speed videos of how the thing works.

His videos aren't just all about technology—he gets into engineering ethics in a way too.  For example, one of his recent videos covers the three-in-a-row explosions of cargo-rocket launches that were intended to resupply the International Space Station.  Ever the optimist, his take on them is that if we were going to have some rockets blow up, this was the perfect time for it to happen, when the Space Station happens to have rather a surplus of food and before we start putting people on those rockets. 

Cameras that can take 100,000 frames per second aren't cheap, and I wondered how Mr. Sandlin pays for all the production expenses of his videos—green screens, high-quality graphics, and so on.  Well, several ways, it appears.  One is contributions—you can donate to his effort through a website called Patreon.  Another is advertising—some of the later videos have little ads at the end for various products (the one I saw boosted a book sold by Amazon).  And there's the revenue from the YouTube viewings.  He is up front about his hopes that Smarter Every Day will provide funds for his children's college education, and there's nothing wrong with that.  So he's an entrepreneur of a sort as well as an engineer, which is a good combination.

One thing that's fairly certain is that Mr. Sandlin hasn't gotten any money from the National Science Foundation.  If he had, they would have insisted that he have some kind of acknowledgment of the fact.  Over the years, I have been peripherally involved with NSF-sponsored efforts in the area of engineering education.  It turns out the kind of skills that enable one to raise or spend NSF education money are not always the kind of skills needed to appeal to a wide popular audience.  NSF would like both, of course, and every now and then, an NSF-sponsored project designed to explain or promote engineering to the general public actually gets a fair number of the general public to pay attention to it.  But successes like that are generally few and far between.

I would point out that Mr. Sandlin has no degree in education—or mass communication, for that matter.  All he had to start with is enthusiasm and a motivation to pay for his kids' college expenses.  And he's come up with something that presents engineering in a positive light to millions of people.  I'm not saying that government support for engineering education efforts directed at the general public is wasted, but Mr. Sandlin's work proves that it's not necessary, and the number of failed projects in that area proves that it's not sufficient, either.

One personal example of how not to do it will suffice here.  Years ago I made a misguided attempt to develop a kind of computer-based learning module for non-engineers.  I took a lot of NSF money and spent a whole summer at Cornell University with a grad student, learning how to use a very early version of development software for that kind of thing.  The project was used in an experimental course once, and that was that.  Clearly, it was not my forte.

Mr. Sandlin makes it look easy, but he says on his website that each video takes upwards of 100 hours to produce, and I believe him.  What he's doing deserves the support and encouragement of the engineering community, and so I encourage my readers to take a look at www.smartereveryday.com.  If you like what you see, let Mr. Sandlin know.  He's doing a good thing for engineering and the world.

Sources:  I encountered Mr. Sandlin's work in the form of his video on Prince Rupert's drops at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs.  His video on the cargo-rocket explosions is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbabP9ttrZc.  His main website is www.smartereveryday.com, and I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Destin Sandlin."