Federal Agency to Track Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation of Research Doctorate Recipients

Pro-transgender protesters outside of Boston Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sept. 18, 2022. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

A pilot project announced by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) seeks to track the sexual orientation and gender identity of research doctorate recipients—a move raising concerns about the potential invasion of privacy and enforcement of LGBT quotas.

The Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), conducted annually by the NSF, aims to collect personal and demographic data of individuals who have earned research doctorates from an accredited U.S. institution in the past year. The survey already collects data related to sex. However, the NSF’s new pilot project, announced in May, seeks to collect information regarding sexual orientation and gender identity as well. The “gender identity question experiment plan” (pdf) asks, “What sex were you assigned at birth on your original birth certificate,” providing two options—male or female.

It then asks about the degree recipients’ gender identity—whether they describe themselves as male, female, transgender, or by a different term. Another question asks whether they see themselves as a man, woman, transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming, genderfluid, or genderqueer.

In the sexual orientation category, the recipients are asked if they’re straight or heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, or have another orientation.

In a May 29 Wall Street Journal op-ed, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss criticized the NSF’s decision to survey people’s gender and sexual orientation. “Asking about sexual preferences is a violation of privacy,” he wrote. “Such personal matters are irrelevant to science and essentially invisible.”

Krauss raised concerns about whether the sexual and gender identity surveys will be used to determine which groups are underrepresented in STEM fields and eventually require diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices to set aside quotas for people identifying with such categories. STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math.

He argued that if the NSF is going to ask about gender and sex identities, it should also consider asking about other private issues like religion or politics that would yield skewed results.

“Atheists and Jews are surely overrepresented among scientists; conservatives and evangelical Christians [are] underrepresented. I wonder what the DEI officers would make of that,” Krauss noted.

“By pandering to the loudest new minorities so that DEI bureaucrats can expand their definitions of inclusion, the NSF is erecting yet another barrier to scientific collegiality and integrity.”

LGBT Quotas

Back in August 2018, a letter signed by several scientists and institutions called on the NSF to include questions about sexual and gender identity on its SED as well as other surveys like the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and the National Survey of College Graduates. The letter (pdf) argued that LGBT people face “disadvantages and disparities in STEM fields.”

In November 2018, the NSF decided to test the feasibility of adding questions related to sexual orientation and gender identity in the SED.

There are concerns the surveys may end up enforcing LGBT quotas in science funding and research. This is already happening in some institutions.

In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) pledged in October to include non-binary researchers in its attempt to ensure equality of investigator grants.

In the United States, 18 Democrat senators wrote a letter (pdf) to the NSF on Feb. 1, asking that it adopt “voluntary gender identity and sexual orientation questions on its national workforce surveys.”

“The survey data provided by these questions is critical to implementing federal policy, including competitive awards in the CHIPS and Science Act to increase the participation of underrepresented communities in STEM studies and careers,” it said.

‘There Are Two Sexes’

In his op-ed, Krauss pointed out that terms like gender non-conforming, nonbinary, transgender, genderqueer, and genderfluid are “patently ridiculous” as they are “subjective categories.”

“Most scientists, like ordinary people, couldn’t even define most of these terms, let alone use them as a basis for discrimination,” he pointed out. “The percentage of the population that espouses these labels is so small that any data the NSF gathers will be statistically useless.”

Other prominent scientists have also pushed back against the idea of multiple genders. In an interview with Piers Morgan’s “TalkTV” show in March, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said that “there are two sexes. And that’s all there is to it.”

Dawkins went on to criticize radical gender ideologues, stating that “it’s very upsetting the way this tiny minority of people has managed to capture the discourse to really talk errant nonsense.”

In an interview with EMMA, a German feminist magazine, in August last year, Nobel laureate Christiane Nusslein-Volhard called the idea of there being more than two genders “nonsense” and “wishful thinking.”

“There are people who want to change their gender, but they can’t do it. You remain XY or XX,” she said. “Intersexuality is caused by rare deviations, for example, in the chromosome set. But intersex people also have the characteristics of both genders; they are not a third gender.”