What The Hell America!

In a sweeping rollback of diversity efforts, the NSF abruptly terminated our grant for a journal focused on advancing gender equity in academic STEM—jeopardizing decades of progress for women in science.

We received notification last week from the National Science Foundation that the remaining three years of our grant have been canceled. The grant funded a credible, peer-reviewed academic journal, the ADVANCE Journal: Individual and Institutional Transformation for Social Justice, which focused on supporting women in academic STEM fields and advancing the knowledge base that informs higher education theory, institutional transformation and workplace satisfaction.

It is one of a few open-access, peer-reviewed publications dedicated to advancing gender equity in academic STEM. Women, it seems, however, are no longer a priority for NSF.

In its anti-DEI efforts, the current administration has targeted for elimination federally-funded grants, projects and programs that center women, as well as BIPOC and LGBTQ people. The administration’s argument is that these projects violate civil rights law by discriminating against straight white men. Yet, the data show that women still experience the harmful effects of sexist discrimination and that interventions are still needed to work toward greater equity.

Within academic STEM, women have long faced issues of discrimination and mistreatment, and outright attacks such as those we are seeing of late. Women are underrepresented within STEM departments and colleges, with only a few notable exceptions such as biology and psychology. Women face greater barriers than their male colleagues in hiring, tenure, promotion and overall career advancement. They are often excluded from knowledge-generating and research-producing networks, overburdened with invisible labor that bears no credit toward career advancement, harassed sexually, bullied, assaulted, assumed incompetent, and made either hypervisible or invisible altogether.

Our journal published research documenting this systemic inequity, as well as descriptions and assessments of projects and initiatives tackling gender inequity at institutions across the country. 

When NSF launched the ADVANCE program in 2001, it focused on supporting individual women scientists and provided grants to advance their research.

Later, however, NSF, along with other institutions, recognized that the problems of gender inequity in academic STEM are systemic and structural, not person-specific. The program then shifted its focus to transforming institutional structures, policies and practices through innovative projects and initiatives.

To date, ADVANCE projects have led to important evidence-based innovations related to improving the academic STEM workplace, advancing women in academic STEM and generating greater workplace satisfaction. Across its lifespan, the ADVANCE program has demonstrated that addressing and dismantling persistent gender inequity is an essential aspect of innovation and progress in STEM higher education. 

Our grant was funded by the NSF’s ADVANCE Program to share the collective knowledge generated by its many funded projects and to make accessible these projects’ blueprints for implementing successful strategies that have transformed colleges and universities into more welcoming, inclusive and equitable institutions for women—and all genders—in STEM. Now, under the current administration’s approach to government efficiency and campaign against inclusion, equity and justice efforts, minus constructive engagement with higher education, NSF has dismantled the entire ADVANCE program.

Why does it matter whether or not women are involved in academic STEM? We know from the research that diverse teams do better science. Women often bring different questions and different analyses based on their experiences; and our lives are all the better for it.

Where would we be without the research innovation of Gladys West, Grace Hopper and so many more? Women in STEM deserve the same opportunities, support, recognition and rewards for their intellectual work, innovation, teaching, service and mentorship as men. 

Shuttering NSF’s ADVANCE program, and ending funding for the ADVANCE Journal and numerous other ADVANCE projects around the nation, will eventually have a deleterious effect on science, and, hence, on the lives of people in the U.S. and around the world. 

The ADVANCE Journal, which began in 2018, grew out of a five-year Institutional Transformation grant at Oregon State University. In 2023, we received a second NSF ADVANCE grant to sustain the journal for five years.

As feminists, we wanted to do academic publishing differently. We wanted our journal to be accessible to everyone rather than behind paywalls. We also take seriously the need for mentoring women and making academic publishing possible for women, and so as editors we spent a great deal of time working with authors whose work might have been rejected out of hand by traditional journals. Our journal was interdisciplinary and invited conversation between STEM and the arts and humanities. We accepted a wide variety of genres beyond traditional research articles, including poetry, personal narrative and artwork.

We expected our grant to be terminated, after our project and many like it appeared on a list in a press release issued by Sen. Ted Cruz’s office boasting about an investigation “[uncovering] $2 billion in woke DEI grants at NSF.” Yet, when we received the notification of grant termination—with no explanation beyond our work is no longer in alignment with NSF’s new priorities—our hearts sank. We are losing not just our journal, but decades of struggle and progress for women to be treated equitably within academic STEM. 

Call for Personal Essay/Impact Statement for NSF Grants and their Terminations

Currently, we are working on collecting impact statements and stories from people whose ADVANCE grants were terminated. (Submit one here.) If anything, this reckless decimation of projects built with rigor and care and the elimination of people’s livelihoods without a second thought only reaffirm our commitment to our work.

As feminist scholars and editors, we will seek new paths forward for the journal and will continue to work to encourage equity for women, make scholarship that benefits women widely available and support new generations of women scholars whose contributions make the world better for us all.

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