NSF still won ’t track sexual orientation among scientific workforce, prompting frustration

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) says it does not plan to include a question about sexual orientation in a major national workforce survey, prompting hundreds of researchers to send a letter of protest. Last month, the agency submitted its plans for the 2023 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG), a biennial survey of more than 160,000 U.S. bachelor’s degree holders with a focus on the science and engineering workforce, to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for approval. Many LGBTQ scientists were pleased that the survey will, for the first time, include a question about gender identity for all respondents. But the absence of a sexual orientation question is “incredibly disappointing,” says Ramón Barthelemy, an assistant professor at the University of Utah who has studied the experiences of LGBTQ scientists in physics. Speaking as a gay man, he says, “We have fought so hard for so long to try to get representation in the scientific community, and what NSF is communicating to us is, they don’t want us to have that representation.” The agency had raised hopes in 2021 when it pilot tested questions about gender identity and sexual orientation on the NSCG . Advocates took that as a sign that in coming years the agency would fully implement those questions in its suite of workforce surveys, including the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, which focus on Ph.D.-educated scientists and engineers...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news