In recent years, the editorial boards of international scientific journals have published and given voice to researchers in the hard sciences claiming visibility, consideration of gender, “racial”, ethnic and sexual minorities, and denouncing discrimination in the within STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics; STEM in English).
As early as 2013, an article (Ko et al.) presented, in a critical analysis, the journey and experience of women researchers of color, “using the theory of intersectionality and narrative analysis” and showing “the way whose intersection of gender and race affects performance, identity, persistence, and overall career and educational experiences in the physical sciences”. Kozlowski et al. (2022) note through biometric analysis that the community of American researchers made up of “white men” is not representative of the population, and that while most studies have focused “on race or sex”, they do not take into account “the intersection of these variables”.
Some therefore consider that “efforts to establish and reduce bias in scholarly publishing will require authors, reviewers and editors to disclose their race or ethnicity” (Else & Perkel, 2022).
Partisan ideology
At Concordia University (Montreal), the Decolonizing Light team studies “the reproduction of colonialism in and through physics and in the higher education of physics”. His motivation is described thus: “even more than the other sciences, physics is a field dominated by white men, and therefore a mirror of colonial patterns and social inequalities.” The “therefore” suggests that what follows (colonial patterns and social inequalities) is a logical consequence of simply being “white”. It is clear that partisan ideology supersedes the minimal rigor of the scientific method.
It is however good to remember that in the United States, because of segregation, universities were created for the Blacks (HBCU, Historically Black Colleges and Universities): Lincoln University, Howard University, Morehouse College and Spelman College. It wasn’t until 1955 that the first black student was able to attend the University of Alabama, and only in 1962 was the first black student able to attend the University of Mississippi. Similarly, a numerus clausus (quota) applied to Jews was officially in place in several North American universities. Instructions to Yale’s admissions office regarding ethnic quotas were very specific: “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks” (Burrow, 2008). It is therefore to counter this discrimination, among others, with regard to the access of Blacks to universities that the policy of positive discrimination (“affirmative action”) was put in place in 1965.
“Since the origin of the American nation, every citizen throughout his life has continued to state his racial identity… This classification, which seems obsessive to us, was first at the origin of discrimination; then it became the base of affirmative action. But isn’t this one the continuation of that one in new clothes?”, estimated in 2003 Ward Connely, an African-American opponent of “affirmative action”. “Affirmative action perpetuates addiction and slave behavior by another name. Many young black people conclude that we should not work too much in school, since white people will owe them compensation anyway: common behavior that makes you lose your footing in school and then in society”. American supporters of the abolition of positive discrimination claim a “colorblind” America, indifferent to racial criteria, more adapted to the new realities of a nation where institutional segregation is history, and where interbreeding increasingly makes more improbable the determined ethnic categories.
“Communitarian” incursions
Recently, an article in the journal Science (Mervis, 2022) noted the current underrepresentation of black, African American and other students in physics in the United States. Among other things, it shows that the number of American doctorates in physics awarded to Hispanic students has tripled (from 16 to 60 PhDs) over the past twenty years, while remaining absolutely stable for black students (16 PhDs per year). Despite the title of the article, no exclusion is highlighted.
All of this so-called evidence of under-representation is based on the assumption that each domain should reflect population proportions, which sociologically makes no sense. For example, if the vast majority of primary and secondary teachers are women, does this prove that men are discriminated against in the world of education?
Moreover, very recently, an express request visibility and inclusion in STEM of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) people was published by the Journal of Chemical Education. Their findings are “that the current STEM climate and culture leads to exclusionary behaviors and marginalization of LGBTQ+ people.”
Anna Krylov, professor of quantum chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC) is an active promoter of gender equality in STEM fields. In her remarkable article “The danger of politicizing science” (2021), she alerts the scientific community: “Our future is at stake. As a community, we are faced with an important choice. We can succumb to the prevailing ideology and spend the rest of our lives on a witch hunt, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining the elements of language and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) into a charade Or we can uphold one of the key principles of democratic society, the free, uncensored exchange of ideas, and continue our central mission, the pursuit of truth, by focusing our attention on solving the real problems fundamental to the humanity.” “Normalizing ideological intrusion into science and abandoning Mertonian principles [NDLR : l’acceptation ou le rejet d’une proposition scientifique ne doit pas dépendre des attributs sociaux ou personnels de l’énonciateur] will cost us dearly. We can’t afford it,” she warns.
The fight against discrimination of any kind is obviously legitimate, and the supervisory authorities must promote the attraction of science and the diversification of students, but the question today is whether learned societies and scientific journals – particularly French – will be able to resist “communitarian” incursions and other non-scientific claims. From now on, we can note that these editorial policies, thinking to give themselves an image of openness and to repair who knows what primordial fault, abdicate the scientific methods of proof as practiced in human science, and most often go astray with each attempt.
* Gérard Panczer is a professor of optical spectroscopy of geomaterials at Claude-Bernard-Lyon I University. He is a member of the Vigilance Universités collective.