Will You Refuse a COVID-19 Vaccine
Developed by White Males?
If life or death were hanging in the balance, would you choose a doctor based on training and skill or sex and race? Covid-19 Vaccine
Before you reject my question as a false choice, take a look at today’s real-life hiring criteria for far too many jobs.
Increasing numbers of employers require white and Asian male job applicants in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to submit a diversity statement along with information of lesser importance like their educational achievements, work history, publications, and professional references.
Start with the “woke” faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Alzheimer’s researchers seeking a position in its neurology lab last year were required to document their contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Berkeley’s Life Sciences department rejected 76% of applicants because their diversity statements failed to impress. The hiring committee didn’t even look at the failed applicants’ research records.
Were the remaining contenders the best scientists in their field? Looks like it didn’t matter.
Harvard’s Dean of Science announced that he would be hiring two junior faculty based on their ability to “strengthen diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” Teaching ability and research contributions played second fiddle. White and Asian males need not apply.
In June, a potpourri of academic societies, universities, and publishers participated in a “Strike for Black Lives,” shutting down for a day to focus on “systemic racism in the research community and to craft ways to address inequalities.” The organizers intended “to give others an opportunity to reflect on their own complicity in anti-Black racism in academia.”
Part of me smiles to see leftist professors lumped in with police forces as “systemic racists.” Like the 1789 French Revolution that began with high ideals but ended with Napoleon, the political left is devouring its own. Sadly, focusing on STEM diversity rather than merit will dilute the quality of the country’s next generation of scientists.
Ask yourself if we want the world’s best researchers working on COVID-19 vaccines. Or do we want the best female, black and Hispanic researchers working on them? It’s great when the same person is in both categories. But when that doesn’t happen, it’s foolish and dangerous to treat sex and race as superior qualifications.
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, announced that he would no longer attend scientific conferences that showed insufficient “attention to inclusiveness.” The sex and race of conference participants is of primary importance to him, even if white or Asian men happen to be presenting breakthrough research results.
On January 30th, CNN berated President Trump’s coronavirus task force for being too white and too male. Would CNN’s social justice warriors have been happier if Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was replaced by a female Native American epidemiologist?
Unfortunately, those seeking what they term social justice are unsatisfied with equal opportunity, insisting instead on equal outcomes. For them, since women are 51 percent of the population, 51 percent of STEM workers should be female; anything less is prima facie evidence of discrimination.
Ignoring or bypassing experienced white and Asian male STEM workers solely by virtue of their race and sex cannot be supported by any objective criterion. The far better approach: encouraging and providing opportunities for promising females and minorities to enter STEM fields. But here too, equal results are demanded rather than equal opportunity.
Cornell University’s engineering admissions are representative of top tier universities. The school gets about 2.5 times as many male as female applicants to its undergraduate engineering program but women are about three times as likely to be admitted, resulting in a balance between the sexes. Yet the admitted women have lower average math scores than men: sex triumphs over merit once again.
Similar examples are repeated over and over across the country.
It’s time to insist on merit and true equal opportunity in STEM and in all fields. Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The same applies to sex.
If you disagree, insist on waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine developed by an appropriately diverse research team.
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