• CAREER COLUMN

My ‘woke DEI’ grant has been flagged for scrutiny. Where do I go from here?

My work in making artificial intelligence fair has been noticed by US officials intent on ending ‘class warfare propaganda’.
By
  1. Emma Pierson

    1. Emma Pierson is an assistant professor of computer science at Berkeley.

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In February, I learnt that a National Science Foundation grant funding my US laboratory, along with more than 3,000 other such grants, had been flagged for federal government scrutiny because, according to the US Senate Commerce Committee, it “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda”.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01218-5

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

References

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  2. Zink, A., Obermeyer, Z. & Pierson, E. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 121, e2402267121 (2024).

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  3. Papakyriakopoulos, O. et al. in FAccT '23: Proc. 2023 ACM Conf. on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 881–904 (Assoc. Comp. Machin., 2023).

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  4. Wilson, B., Hoffman, J. & Morgenstern, J. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1902.11097 (2019).

  5. Shanmugam, D., Hou, K. & Pierson, E. npj Womens Health 2, 15 (2024).

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