Our country has seen renewed attacks on efforts to diversify the workforce, which I find extremely alarming. Would one keep a stockbroker who refused to diversify a portfolio? Or eat the same food every day for every meal? Or instead of 128 crayons, what if Crayola only placed one crayon in the box? Many of us can remember the horror when an important crayon was missing! It changed the entire picture and improvising did not provide the same benefit. Even kindergarteners realize that you can’t create a masterpiece with only one color.
I am most familiar with attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within the scientific workforce. Training physicians and scientists has been, and remains, an important aspect of my career.
Racists and sexists, disguised as scholars, saturate public literature with skillfully designed phrases designed to evoke negative emotions: liberal, critical race theory and red states vs. blue states, to name a few. It almost seems as if these DEI critics long for the “good old days,” when minorities, like my grandmother, worked 12 hours a day for $0.50 (for a well-endowed white family). Would they have questioned who cooked and cleaned for her children while my grandmother worked? It was her 6-year-old daughter, my mother.
Anyone with true concern for social justice would fully support holistic admissions policies because strong work ethic, brilliance and innovation are present in every socioeconomic class. A standardized test is not sufficient to delineate those essential attributes.
There was a time when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) predominantly funded white male researchers who then investigated diseases impacting white males. Review of their research products revealed many flaws, including the creation of biased databases and clinical trials. They even conducted animal research that only used male animals. Thanks to the federal government’s courage to correct a devastating wrong, the NIH now requires scientists to include both sexes in their research experiments unless there is scientific justification, such as sex-specific diseases like prostate or ovarian cancer. As a consequence, the scientific community progressed from learning a truth, to learning the truth.
Anyone with true concern for social justice would fully support holistic admissions policies because strong work ethic, brilliance and innovation are present in every socioeconomic class.
The NIH also understands that we must diversify the medical workforce in order to be relevant.
A Wall Street Journal opinion writer recently complained about an NIH program called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) that supports the hiring of scientists who are committed to diversity. The writer wrote that NIH distorts the value of excellence by “subordinating it to political ideology.” The FIRST program is a well-planned, essential effort to correct the lack of scientific diversity. It addresses glaring disparities identified in a 2023 study: White males represent about 64.7% of all NIH-funded investigators, while Black researchers only account for 1.8% of all investigators receiving NIH funding. This disparity persists when considering sex and heightens when sex and color are factored in, according to a study published in Science Advances. Out of about 58,000 annual NIH awards, the FIRST program represents 15. Yes, just 0.00025% of the total NIH grants awarded annually and less than 0.001% of the annual NIH extramural funding.
The FIRST program aims to create the same teams that saved the world from COVID. If you’re grateful that you can stop wearing masks, that kids have returned to school, that businesses have reopened, that families can come together again for the holidays, then give a shoutout for diversity. It was an intelligent white male from Kansas (Barney Graham) and a brilliant Black female from North Carolina (Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire), utilizing the technology of an innovative Hungarian-American biochemist (Katalin Kariko), and a groundbreaking Jewish researcher from Massachusetts (Drew Weissman) that generated one the most effective COVID vaccines used worldwide. Those diverse perspectives saved many lives. The NIH FIRST program will hire faculty with a similar commitment to diversity, because diverse teams save lives.
I want to encourage proponents and opponents of DEI to listen to each other with the goal of understanding. Understanding someone’s perspective does not mean that you will agree with them in the end; it does mean that you’ve provided them with the respect that all humans deserve. At the end of the discussion, everyone should leave feeling respected.
DEI enemies must abandon irrational fear. They must abandon incorrect assumptions that scientists can’t be both of the highest caliber and firm believers in social justice. DEI, through innovation and complementary thinking, makes us more productive and benefits the bottom line. The mental darkness attacking DEI leads, ultimately, to self-destruction.
Dr. Wonder Drake (wdrake@som.umaryland.edu) is a professor of medicine and senior associate dean of faculty affairs for the University of Maryland School of Medicine.