Minibabble: What we gain from ‘woke’ science

Posted on August 1, 2025August 1, 2025 by suki

The Babblery

Minibabble: What we gain from 'woke' science

00:00 / 14:01

In conversation with Dr. Heather Ford

We hear a lot about the idea of getting ‘woke’ out of science, but what does that mean? In this mini-episode based on a full-length interview with Dr. Heather Ford, we explore diversity, equity, and inclusion – DEI – in science. Why has the global science community been focused on broadening participation in science, and what are the consequences, especially regarding climate change, to the end of these practices? [Click for transcript]

Visit the main show notes for information about Dr. Ford and the topics we discuss.

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[00:00:31]

[00:00:32] Heather Ford: You don’t want one person who has one set of ideas and one sort of set of values to be making the decisions for an entire community that has a wide range of interests and needs, right?

[00:00:44] Voiceover: We hear a lot about getting woke out of science funding these days, but what does that really mean?

[00:00:50] Heather Ford: My name’s Dr. Heather Ford. I am a climate scientist and what I do is I look at climate over really long, geologic time periods to understand basically how do we use past climate to help understand future climate change.

[00:01:05] Voiceover: I’m your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble . Access the full interview with Heather Ford at BABBLERY.com.

[00:01:13] Heather is teaching young scientists at a time when federal funding for science in higher education is being drastically cut in the US. Administration functionaries are also scouring grant applications in a quest to root out ‘woke’ from federally funded scientific research. Much has been made of their boneheaded word searches, like when they cut funding for a study that included the word diversity, as in the way that plants diversify their species. But such bone headedness masks the real damage that will be done by cutting diversity, equity, and inclusion -DEI- out of science. And in Heather’s field, climate science, the results could be deadly.

[00:01:54] Heather Ford: If you are a climate scientist, you have a sense of if we don’t do something that everybody’s quality of life will go down. And, and ultimately, like, I want people to be safe? Seeing these cuts happen, people will die. And it’s hard to communicate that with people.

[00:02:11] Voiceover: The American system that has nurtured young scientists since the second World War, initially embraced mostly white men, but started opening up to women and minorities in the nineties. Heather’s interest in science wasn’t predetermined. It was nurtured from a natural event that sparked her interest.

[00:02:27] Heather Ford:

[00:02:28] I always say that the gateway drugs to science are the stars, dolphins, and dinosaurs. Right. And in any of those three, you end up finding something that really sparks joy in science, right. And so for me it was like a combination of like dinosaurs and dolphins.

[00:02:42] It was the 97 98 El Nino, which I think still is the largest El Nino event recorded. And El Nino, is a climatological event that happens in the tropical Pacific and it has these wide ranging teleconnections, it causes floods in California where I grew up. Um, it causes fires in Australia and so my high school was right across, the street from the levy of the Calaveras River, and I remember walking along the levee and just seeing the water was so close to breaking the levee, and if it hadn’t broken up farther up the head headwaters it, you know, it would’ve devastated the Sacramento and Stockton communities.

[00:03:24] And I, you know, teenager Heather was just flabbergasted that this, this climatological event in the tropical Pacific could have such huge repercussions for the global community. And so I think that that really kind of, it was the event that really made me think about climate and how it has these, these, you know, long distance teleconnections and how it influences communities differently.

[00:03:50] Voiceover: You could say that Heather’s career trajectory is a lesson in why DEI is important in science. She was a girl living in a rural, landlocked community who because the potential for girls in science was now being supported, was able to nurture her curiosity about El Nino, the ocean and climate.

[00:04:08] She moved to the coast and got a PhD from the University of California. But the fight for equity for women in science is hardly over. Heather explains some numbers that illuminate what women are up against.

[00:04:20] Heather Ford: For the National Science Foundation, specifically, women principal investigators, so like leads on a grant, represent only 34% of all active grants. So, you know, women make up about half of the population. Right? But in terms of who’s getting competitive grants, um, and who’s applying for National Science Foundation, it’s about 34%. And of those grants that have been terminated by Trump’s agenda, 58% of the grants that have been cut are women leads.

[00:04:51] So even though women represent about a third of grants that are, that are awarded by the National Science Foundation, the 58% of them have been canceled because they don’t fit in with Trump’s woke agenda. So right away you’re already seeing like active discrimination on a couple different fronts.

[00:05:07] Voiceover: Heather relates the importance of having women in scientific research to the field of economics. Economists have found that it’s most effective to give women rather than men microloans to improve their communities.

[00:05:20] Heather Ford: Because women would reinvest in the community. And I think that that says a lot about how generally, not exclusively, but how women value communities. We’re gonna use this money, we’re going to use this, idea, this grant money, and we’re going to make the community better.

[00:05:40] I think probably the way that we’re socialized, and I don’t know if there’s a biological intuition or anything, I don’t know, it’s probably just because we’re socialized this way, is that we, you know, are in interested often in investing in community. And so I think that that, you know, drives a kind of research a lot of women do, um, because, you know, we’ve disproportionately been impacted by these funding cuts and how it doesn’t fit in with the with the ‘woke agenda.’ I think that women often think about these community level questions, and that is evidently problematic because it does consider how your lived experience impacts the way that you know, you interact in society, whether it’s gender, whether it’s race, whether it’s economic status, It’s how you bring yourself to the table.

[00:06:26] Voiceover: The inclusion piece of DEI is vital to nurturing the careers of people who would not normally be in charge of their own research. Heather talks about how women and minorities can be isolated and how the initiative to broaden participation has worked in her career.

[00:06:41] Heather Ford: I think one of the things that, if I speak from my experience just as a white woman, one of the things that often makes the scientific process challenging is, is isolation. So like if you’re not, you know, for lack of a better word, like part of the boys club, you know, purposeful or not, there’s exclusion that happens, um, in terms of like project building, like who gets put on grants, that sort of thing.

[00:07:09] And you know, one of the things that’s been really key for my career is the ability to apply for grants and be the principal investigator on a grant and direct my own research and not rely on being grandfathered in and sort of like being part of a boys club you know, that would, would foster my career. It’s given me a lot of autonomy and a lot of independence to be able to apply for grants on my own.

[00:07:33] Voiceover: Heather explains that the emphasis on diversifying the workforce in science was hardly a feel-good gesture. It was done so that research and implementation could be more effective.

[00:07:43] Heather Ford: I think especially one of the things that’s important for climate change is that because of the unique ways that it impacts our community, is that you wanna have everybody on board, right? You want everybody to have some sort of stakeholder engagement in how to build resilient communities. How to think about any mitigating factors and think about re relocation, if that comes down to that and what it looks like to them. You don’t want one person who has one set of ideas and one sort of set of values to be making the decisions for an entire community that has a, a wide range of interests and needs, right?

[00:08:23] And so being able to have everybody at the table, and have some sort of input I think is really important. And one of the things that’s mandated by Congress, which is one of the things that’s being cut, like 90% of the, the budget for broadening participation, that’s what it’s called, broadening participation. It’s been a part of the National Science Foundation grant awards for a very long time. It’s just the acknowledgement that it’s important to have a variety of voices, when you’re thinking about the process of science, when you’re thinking about how different, you know, research or inventions, impact communities, it’s important to have a variety of people that can come to the table and, and do the process of science. Broadening participation was really to try and engage with communities, and get more voices at the table. This includes women. This includes, um, underrepresented minorities. And so there’s been a lot of programs, regardless of whether or not they’re effective or not, but the intention is to broaden participation. And we have seen the participation of women increase in science, for instance, that’s largely driven by white women. Um, but there has been gains in, in, in science for white women specifically.

[00:09:31] But we are seeing that there’s still some groups that are being left behind and aren’t, aren’t part of the conversational, and that includes underrepresented minorities: the Black, um, the Hispanic communities, um, indigenous groups, um, those are communities that are generally poorly engaged, with kind of like the scientific process. Um, and these are often the, the communities that are most impacted or marginalized by climate change. So really especially important to get their input and get their stakeholder engagement in, in thinking about these sorts of things.

[00:10:02] I think that one of the big challenges with future climate change was that you will see community displacement, you’ll see people who migrate. And we’re seeing that as well with, you know, a lot of the issues, um, in the Middle East and like Syria and Yemen, like especially with the, the famines that have happened there, like a lot of the, the sensitivity of those communities to things like famine is exacerbated by climate change.

[00:10:26] Voiceover: Looking back at this time, historians will be able to see that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change, even if we don’t know it. Heather talks about how even with the amount of awareness that we would hope that people have today, they are still surprised when climate change comes to their own community.

[00:10:43] Heather Ford: You know, there was horrific flooding in Europe, um, a couple years ago. You know, Germany had huge flooding and I think that also one of the things that was really interesting about that experience for those groups that were impacted by those large floods is that I think a lot of people think that climate change is something that just happens to poor brown people. And then it was happening in Europe and largely consistent with what we would predict with climate change. And then they’re like, but this isn’t, this isn’t supposed to happen here.

[00:11:14] And I was like, well, where did you think was going to happen?

[00:11:20] Voiceover: In our conversation, Dr. Heather Ford and I spoke about the passion and joy that is behind scientific research and the sense of despair that scientists are feeling now that research funding is being cut with so little awareness of how those cuts will affect communities now and in the future.

[00:11:39] Heather Ford: Students have worked with me either when I was a postdoc or you know, now when I’m a, a university professor. They get this experience and they also get to get this joy of science. You know, there’s, science is joyful in many ways. The process of science is joyful.

[00:11:54] And there’s joy in learning something like that. And it, you know, it, It frustrates me that those experiences are being robbed of future generations by this administration and the choices that they’re making . It’s devastating.

[00:12:11] Voiceover: Thanks to Dr. Heather Ford for sharing her experiences with us. You can hear the full episode at BABBLERY.com.

[00:12:18] The song Intertwined is by Unwoman at unwoman.com.

[00:12:23] Thanks for listening.

[00:12:24]