NASA moves to erase 'women in leadership,' 'Indigenous people' from websites

[IwantToRetire]

The space agency is being quite thorough in its compliance with President Donald Trump's executive order against programs promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Per a Jan. 22 directive obtained by 404 Media, space agency employees were recently told to purge public sites of mentions of DEI, Indigenous people, environmental justice, and women in leadership.

"Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5 pm ET today. This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request. Note that the list below is the list that exists this morning, but it may grow as the day goes on.
DEIA
Diversity (in context of DEIA)
Equity (" ")
Inclusion (" ")
Accessibility (" ")
MSI
Minority Serving Institution
Indigenous People
EEJ
EJ
Environmental Justice
Underrepresented groups/people
Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)"

A NASA employee who asked to remain anonymous since they were not authorized to speak to the media told the site "We were absolutely required to scrub all DEI related or DEI adjacent topics and terms from all external websites by 5 pm the 22nd, which was a drop everything and get it done task."

https://www.chron.com/news/space/article/nasa-dei-website-20146613.php

Glad they are complying. It's shocking that some government depts seem to feel obeying is optional.

Some will feel uncomfortable with removing special mention of women given the struggle to get women in leadership roles in the first place, but it has to be all or nothing and NASA is a space agency not a social project.

DEI is backward thinking. NASA should only have the best.

Trump's tools on the scene 😂😂😂😂😂😂

Great - everyone should be treated the same, on merit and the money saved from DEI can be spent on NASA explorations, it's a win-win.

The only one I think needs a rethink is accessibility.
Disabled people do need special requirements at times to do their job and should be offered that as long as their capability to do the job is the same as other applicants generally.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law in 1990, prohibits discrimination against those with disabilities.

Well there you go. Binning off women in leadership initiatives taking women further away from equality.

But at least it got rid of those pesky trans women too eh.

It's so bizarre that only a week ago everyone here was celebrating what a leap Trump was making for women's rights because they're too preoccupied with trans women to see the wood for the trees.

Are you really unable to understand that people may support one policy while opposing another policy?

I am relieved that Trump has binned the genderist ideology that has harmed so many women and children. That desperately needed doing. I wish the UK government would do the same.

It doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with anything else he does.

Yay, fascism! Trump bots out in force.

What you, and apparently the rest of the FWR board, don't seem to get is that the "binning of gender ideology" as you put it and the dismantling of women's rights go hand in hand for Trump and the yes men he has surrounded himself with.

This myopic obsession has played into his hands, fueled the worst prejudices of the electorate and is about to hit women in America big time.

@suggestionsplease1 well said.

The problem is you may miss out on "the best" people because of discrimination, or because the best candidates don't even apply for jobs because they don't think their face will fit.

What is your understanding of DEI?

Many of these are problematic in the context of DEI, but fine or useful in other contexts.

For example, if they wanted to talk about the challenges of adapting space capsules for women, that's pretty interesting and real.

Or how an accessibility policy works.

So hopefully they will have some room for that and people who are sensible enough in the organization to manage it. Though unfortunately in my experience dei managers don't tend to have the greatest advanced language skills.

Well, you appear to think that you are smarter than most other FWR posters here. Do you really think you 'see' something others fail to perceive? I think not.

I think the issue not just about whether someone who has one policy that on paper you agree with but not others, but the fact that what Trump is doing now is totally against how Government runs.

I dont know if he really is just thick, or that he hasn't understood about the various mechanisms for changing policies in different departments, or he is just basically a tyrant.

As on the other thread about USAID, even if there needs to be change what they are doing is cutting of people's salaries with out due notice, in the instance of aid plunging women in starvation and worse, just because they think they can.

Trump and his henchman Musk are making a mockery of collective responsibility. They are using their positions to carry out personal vendettas eg going after the people who sued the Capitol Hill rioters.

If this was Putin or some African President we would all be shaking our heads at this blatant corruption of power.

Even if I agreed with every policy change they are making I totally and absolutely think they are out of control.

Most of the time Government with large departments clearly aren't working as well as they could.

But the people who are going to pay the price for this are all the employees who have no say in policy or whatever.

They are ones now being forced onto the breadline.

How is it possible that anyone is applauding this type of behaviour.

I bet all of you if you were treated like that would be the first to say that it was unfair, unprincipled and scary.

The US is meant to be the most powerful democracy in the world, and it in now being run by a petty tyrant, and his tech bro henchman who has used immature male underlings to steal personal information from Government computer systems. Do you think that's okay? To let Musk build up a target list of people.

Luckily, democracy flourishes much more easily in the UK.

Oh...

In America, the Democrats don't deserve to be in power, so I guess people will take what they can from Trump.

There have been many warnings over many years that so-called 'DEI' training and policies were becoming 'TRA' training and policies, with scant attention given to other groups e.g. women and disabled people, who were expected to hand over access to their designated spaces to any trans male or able-bodied trans person who demanded it.

What has been labelled Diversity Equality and Inclusivity recently has been no such thing. Real DEI has been hollowed out by gender ideology, not just ignoring but being inimical to women's rights, disability rights, lesbians rights, children's rights etc., so there was nothing worth defending when Trump came for it.

The rise of a GC 'movement' is the result of women realising that existing bodies, laws and policies no longer include us in their version of DEI and that the only choice is a fluid, multifaceted, grassroots movement, defending women and children's rights as and when and how we can.

NASA may have 'purged' their sites of references to women and indigenous people etc but I would like to see proof of that, as a very similar claim was made that the USAF had been forced to remove all mention of the WASPS and the Tuskegee Redtails, which turned out not to be true.

Whether this is fake news or not, NASA's hiring policies are not high on my list of concerns, there are plenty of issues for women here on earth to worry about - single sex spaces trump space, so to speak.

You know that NASA do a lot more than "space" and women in STEM is a really important area of equality for women because it's so heavily male dominated that getting women into these professions.is incredibly difficult right?

But as long as women can pee without a trans woman in the same facility who cares about women in STEM or opportunities for women I'm research eh?

It’s a baby and bath water situation.

From the very best of motives, we’ve created an industry that now holds back progress.

There’s an army built up around aid, inclusion, charity, environment- and it’s white/green/rainbow washing instead of achieving its aims.

But as long as women can pee without a trans woman in the same facility who cares about women in STEM or opportunities for women I'm research eh?

That's one great leap, and not a very logical one!

[a] I don't care about women in STEM [if you knew me IRL you'd feel silly for suggesting that] because I want single sex spaces?
[b] NASA's DEI policies are the only source of opportunities for women in STEM?
[c] women's rights to single sex spaces are somehow linked to? dependent on? NASA's DEI policies?

Is this an acceptable statement of DEI re hiring?

Recruitment should be from qualified individuals from appropriate sources in an endeavour to achieve a work force from all segments of society, and selection and advancement should be determined solely on the basis of relative ability, knowledge and skills, after fair and open competition which assures that all receive equal opportunity.

NASA actually did an audit of themselves in 2023 and found that they had made little progress in improving representation of women and minorities in their workforce in the previous 10 years. Whatever they were doing regarding DEI was not working at the time. Not suggesting these initiatives should be scrapped it’s just a point that they don’t always work.

I have no desire for women to get jobs in STEM due to filling some sort of quota.

Quotas are a bad solution to a genuine problem that Trump has zero intention of trying to fix in any other way.