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. 

Trump, Twitter, and Section 230

 

The events in Washington, D. C. last Wednesday, and the subsequent permanent suspension by Twitter of the account @realDonaldTrump, throw into a spotlight glare the question of how responsible social-media companies are for the material that users post by the technical means that the companies provide.  They add urgency to a question that was already being raised:  should Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 be modified or repealed?

 

The critical part of Section 230 has been hailed as "the twenty-six words that created the Internet," which is also the title of a book by Jeff Kosseff.  In case you're wondering, the twenty-six words are, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”  To see how these words apply to, for example, the thousands of tweets from President Trump, read "Twitter" for "provider . . . of an interactive computer service" and "President Trump" for "another information content provider." 

 

What this section did was to place the then-infant Internet in the category of common-carrier communications providers such as telephone companies, and not in the category of news providers such as the New York Times.  The traditional "old media" (newspapers, radio, TV) were regarded in law as the originators of what they printed or broadcast, and could be sued if their material proved libelous or otherwise harmful.  But if a blackmailer, for instance, called his victim on the phone and made a threat, the idea of suing the phone company because of the blackmailer's actions would be regarded as ridiculous.  So for the next two decades or so, the industries spawned by the Internet—notably Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their ilk—grew without concern for possibly crippling lawsuits regarding the content that their users posted.  Legally, it wasn't their fault what people put on their sites, generally speaking.

 

Few people (or lawmakers, who are also people) anticipated that the main source of news and information for millions of U. S. citizens would shift from the old-media world to the social-media world, but that is exactly what happened.  The techno-optimists who foresaw a brave new world of egalitarian news sharing have been disappointed to find that lies get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its pants.  (Neither Winston Churchill nor Mark Twain apparently wrote that, but it's worth saying anyway.)  In particular, the elaborate structure of lies coming from @realDonaldTrump since the Nov. 3 Presidential election has convinced many millions of people that (a) the election results were manipulated by evil conspirators who managed to hide their tracks from everyone except a few off-the-wall news sources and President Trump himself, (b) President Trump actually won the election and deserves to be president for another four years, at least, and (c) the alternative is the end of America, as the evil Biden administration takes charge and sends us all straight to perdition in a wicker container. 

 

After concocting increasingly incredible lawsuits challenging state vote counts, the President issued a call via Twitter for his followers to show up in Washington on Jan. 6, when a joint session of Congress would count the Electoral College votes and certify the result.  He fraudulently claimed that Vice-President Pence had the power to discard the results and reinstate the President, whereas nowhere in the Constitution or elsewhere does the Vice-President receive this power.  But by the technique of saying lies and repeating them over and over in the echo chamber of the Internet where people who like certain kinds of material get more of it, the President drew a crowd of thousands to Washington last Wednesday.  He spoke to them in person in a long, inflammatory speech that repeated many of the lies he originated over the past two months, and then sent them down the street to disrupt, invade, and vandalize the building where the duly elected representatives of these United States were legally carrying out their Constitutional responsibilities.  And Twitter helped him do it.

 

On Friday, Jan. 8, Twitter announced that they were permanently suspending @realDonaldTrump, citing that the President had violated their "Glorification of Violence policy."  To those who would say that Twitter is violating the President's freedom of speech, I would counter along with Justice Holmes that that someone who is "falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic" has forfeited his right to free speech, at least with regard to that particular statement.  And the President has abundantly shown that he is incapable of tweeting without straying into falsehood sooner or later.

 

But in doing so, Twitter has admitted that they do indeed bear the responsibility for the effects of information provided by another information content provider.  In a world where the main source of news for the bulk of the public is social media, social media can no longer pretend that they are a small, insignificant, hobby-type operation that people use mainly for amusement and sharing cookie recipes.  They now play a critical, essential role in the conduct of public affairs, and their increasing censorship of one kind or another (of which the strangling of @realDonaldTrump is only the chief example) amounts to rump editing, essentially no different from what the ink-stained newspaper editors of yore did with their letters to the editor columns.  To choose one letter is to reject all the rest, and to censor one tweet is to accept all the rest.

 

I have no easy solution to the problem of Section 230, but it is clear that things cannot go on the way they are now.  As for President Trump, I hope that Congress has sense and guts enough to impeach him with the penalty of never holding a federal office again.  But social media firms cannot have it both ways.  They must not enjoy the financial and cultural benefits of being the main purveyors of news while shirking the responsibility for the news (and lies) that pass through their hands. 

 

In calmer times, I would have taken notice in this space of the Boeing 737 that crashed off the coast of Jakarta on Jan. 9, but as of this writing there are few details available, and it will have to await a future column.

 

Sources:  The Twitter announcement of the banning of President Trump's account appeared at https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Twitter and Section 230.  The author of the "truth getting its pants on" quote is unknown, but researchers have traced the saying back at least to the 1700s.

We Don't Chat — For Now

 

Today (Sunday, Sept. 20) the U. S. Department of Commerce implemented an unprecedented ban on a major Chinese social media company, WeChat.  Citing security concerns, President Trump issued an executive order on Aug. 6 to cripple WeChat and TikTok, but the TikTok order has been delayed until November.

 

Not so WeChat.  While it will not be illegal for individuals to continue using WeChat in the U. S., it may become difficult or impossible in the days to come. 

 

The Dept. of Commerce order bans the distribution of the WeChat app to new phones and prohibits the transfer of funds through the app.  It also prohibits internet service providers from servicing the app, and so unless your ISP is based outside the U. S., the app may disappear altogether.  Some of the terms of the ban are rather technical, but I think a word from the underworld covers the intent of the order:  they want to kneecap WeChat. 

 

Anyone who knows a person who speaks Chinese has probably heard them at least mention WeChat.  It's operated by the huge Chinese Google-like conglomerate Tencent, and is sort of like Facebook on steroids.  In addition to allowing Facebook-like interactions, it serves as a money transfer medium, a news app, messaging app, and of course, an advertising medium.  According to a report in the Washington Post, the Chinese government censors it heavily, and independent investigators who tested it with 26,000 test words on accounts registered in China, Canada, and the U. S. found nearly 200 words triggered censorship in accounts with Chinese phone numbers.  Over three million people use WeChat in the U. S., and the majority of them are going to have big problems trying to continue with the app after today.

 

Why is the U. S. government landing on WeChat like a piano from a third-floor window?  The official announcement is terse on this:  "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S. Today’s announced prohibitions, when combined, protect users in the U.S. by eliminating access to these applications and significantly reducing their functionality."  Personally, my impression of what WeChat does is to connect Chinese speakers in the U. S. with their friends, relatives, associates, and (possibly) fellow spies back in China.  But because the vast majority of what goes on through WeChat is probably in Chinese, it's hard to see how the rest of the U. S. is directly harmed by the existence of the app.

 

What this looks like to me is more along the lines of a diplomatic tit-for-tat on a large scale.  Every so often the U. S. will catch some spies from another country and expel them.  It's entirely expected that in the days to follow, the foreign country will go to the U. S. embassy there and tell an equal number of U. S. diplomats or diplomatic staff to pack their bags and head back to the U. S. 

 

Ever since Facebook, Twitter, and company gained prominence, these U. S.-based apps have been heavily censored or flat-out banned in China, which is one reason why there was such a big vacuum for WeChat to fill.  In going a long way toward banning WeChat here, the U. S. government is simply saying, "You want to ban our apps?  Okay, we'll ban yours and see how you like that." 

 

Such moves have their place in a carefully planned strategic pressure-building exercise that includes sanctions of other kinds.  But this administration's actions toward China do not exactly give the impression of careful deliberation.  Nevertheless, being startling and unpredictable can itself be an effective strategy, and it's possible that WeChat and even the Chinese Communist Party itself was caught off guard.

 

The broader picture of U. S.-China relations, while not explicitly a matter of engineering ethics, deserves mention at this point.  While allowing economic freedom to a great extent, the Chinese government continues to repress political freedom and systematically persecutes certain groups such as the Falun Gong religious organization and the ethnic group termed Uighurs.  These are deplorable actions that deserve censure, and if the WeChat ban is a sort of punishment for these things, it is well deserved. 

 

On the other hand, one has to ask how effective it will be.  Something else not called WeChat but doing everything WeChat does is probably in development at this instant, and the Department of Commerce order hinted that they might take care of that too, if WeChat shows up under another name.  What this action has started is a social-media-ban war that will be marked by a ban followed by an evasive move, then followed by another ban, and so on.  The WeChat users, most of whom probably do nothing more sinister than checking on Aunt Hong in Wuhan every now and then, are caught in the middle, and will have to struggle along as best they can with old-fashioned phone calls or whatever ingenious programmers and companies can come up with to evade the ban. 

 

And there is always the possibility that, as the clock runs down to Election Day, this anti-China move will turn out to be just a political plum offered to supporters of the President, rather than a calculated diplomatic move in a well-crafted chess game.  I don't know how many Chinese-American citizens voted for President Trump in 2016, but this action probably has not endeared him to them. 

 

Historically, one reason the WorldWideWeb has appealed philosophically to certain tendencies of mind is that it does not recognize borders.  For people whose ideal world would be a borderless global block party under a single benevolent government, that has been one of the strengths of the Internet-mediated thing that lets people chat with others halfway around the world as though they were in the same room.  But the Department of Commerce move is an attempt to impose borders on what began as a borderless cyberworld.  Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply a political stunt that will soon be forgotten is something we can't tell yet.  All we can be sure of is that U. S. users of WeChat are going to have a hard time continuing to use it, and we'll just have to wait to see what the wider effects are, if any.

 

Sources:  The official U. S. Department of Commerce statement regarding its orders on WeChat and TikTok can be found at https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerce-department-prohibits-wechat-and-tiktok-transactions-protect.  I also referred to a Washington Post article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/18/wechat-ban-faq/.

Can Democracy Survive Social Media?

That's the question that Wired reporter Issie Lapowsky raises in a Nov. 12 piece entitled "Facebook Alone Didn't Create Trump—The Click Economy Did."  Like many in the media, Lapowsky wasn't expecting Trump to win.  But she got a hint of what might happen when she spoke in October with a 75-year-old Trump supporter in Ohio who told her a string of crazy stories about the various depravities of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  The source of all these patently false but juicy tales?  Facebook. 

It wasn't just negative rumors that helped Trump win, says Lapowsky, but the way Trump conveyed his anger and outrage through tweets that were picked up by the media so that even non-tweeters like yours truly read about them.  It turns out that certain emotions play better over social media than others, and anger is near the top of the list. 

Once a surprising and unexpected thing happens, it's not hard to find reasons why it happened.  Whatever your political sympathies may be, the outcome of last Tuesday's presidential race shows us that social media are playing an increasing role in the way politics works in democracies such as the U. S.  And the social and ethical implications of that shift are just now beginning to be understood.

Probably the single most important difference between the way social media convey political messages today and the way the old mass media used to do it, is the fact that people now can choose media that agree with their politics.  This includes friends on Facebook, twitter feeds, websites, and even cable TV channels.  Liberals tend to listen to and read other liberals, and ditto for conservatives.  The ability to self-select one's news sources leads most people to shield themselves in comfortable bubbles or echo chambers in which people hear only the kinds of talk they want to hear.

There's nothing new about this, of course.  But for a period of about sixty years—from around 1920 to 1980—most U. S. citizens received their news from sources that were designed to appeal to the widest range of readers and listeners—and viewers, when TV came along.  John Durham Peters is a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, and he points out that what he calls the "old mass media" used capital-intensive plant and equipment—printing presses, news organizations such as the Associated Press, and radio and TV networks—and therefore had to make money by appealing to the largest number of people.  They did this by developing so-called "objective journalism" that strenuously avoided partisanship and tried to present an even-handed view of political and social events.  The fact that nearly everyone in the U. S. received their news from only a few news networks, which often sounded alike, imposed a uniformity of viewpoint that was not always good—minority and dissident views were often suppressed—but tended to give everyone the same starting point in political discussions.  It's hard to tell, but we may owe a good deal of the comparative unity and domestic peace within the U. S. for that period to the homogenizing influence of mass media.

The funny thing is that the objective journalism of the twentieth-century mass media was itself something of an anomaly historically.  Before newspapers got big enough to organize and use the Associated Press and similar wire-news organizations for most of their news content, most papers were highly partisan.  Even in small towns, Republicans subscribed to the Republican paper and Democrats to the Democratic paper.  Editors took radical stands and learned to deal with the consequences.  In 1869, Mark Twain penned a humorous but only slightly exaggerated view of life at a nineteenth-century newspaper in a satirical piece called "Journalism in Tennessee."  A substitute editor of a small-town paper starts his first day on the job and gets shot at, bombed, thrown out the window, and subjected to a general riot and insurrection that wrecks the office.  When the chief editor returns from vacation, he hears of these disasters and says nothing more than, "You'll like this place when you get used to it." 

Maybe Facebook and Twitter aren't as physically violent as Tennessee journalism was in 1869, but the verbal equivalent of bullets and bombs fly around social media every day, and the effects are often similar.  In 1960, no responsible newspaper would have knowingly printed false stories that one of the Presidential nominees was getting secret messages in an earpiece from a billionaire during debates and was married to a man who had an illegitimate half-black son.  But that's the kind of thing the Wired reporter heard from the Trump supporter, and the stories came from Facebook. 

Every new communications medium, going all the way back to the electromagnetic telegraph, has been hailed at first as a promising means of unifying people, parties, and nations.  And if people were angels, all these glowing predictions would come true.  But angels don't need to send telegrams or tweets, and the fallible, sinful humans who do use communications media often put them to the worst conceivable purposes. 

This is not a call for censorship or any third-party control of the way people communicate with each other.  We need only to recall how social media have played helpful and positive roles in the overthrow of repressive regimes to realize that authoritarian measures to suppress free speech are harmful to democracy.

But in the wake of last week's election, it wouldn't surprise me to see renewed calls for such restraints, although the political climate will soon change to the point that such calls may fall on deaf ears.  What should concern us more is the bad habit many have of isolating themselves by means of social media to the point that so-called discussions amount to nothing more than a group of like-minded people massaging each others' prejudices.  Politics is the art of compromise, but if you spend all your time talking with people who think just like you, you'll lose the ability to compromise.  And no one else is going to make us get out of our self-created shells.  We have to do that on our own.

Sources:  Issie Lapowsky's article " Facebook Alone Didn't Create Trump—The Click Economy Did" appeared in Wired on Nov. 12, 2016 at https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-alone-didnt-create-trump-click-economy/.  John Durham Peters spoke on the old mass media in an interview with Mars Hill Audio's Ken Myers in Vol. 131 of that online audio journal, available at https://marshillaudio.org.  And Mark Twain's satirical piece "Journalism in Tennessee" can be found in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (ed. Charles Neider), published by Bantam in 1971.