> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
Why does an hard working non-legacy white boy deserve less of a shot than a non-legacy black one? Why should he be penalized because someone else’s father with a comparable skin tan was accepted 25 years ago?
Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.
>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.
So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".
That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.
That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.
Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.
(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.
I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).
I would estimate illegal DEI was happening at more than half of top 100 firms. I’m not as familiar with corporations, but I would be checked if it was less than 25% of Fortune 100s. The HR folks all attend the same conferences together. And the big corps set the permission structure for how everyone else acts.
You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.
So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!
On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"
If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.
It's not only not benefitting you but actively putting you at a disadvantage because of the way you where born.
Why do you want it? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay.
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing?
Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have.
Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it.
Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class.
Better what makes better.
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.
> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.
Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.
(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)
Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.
All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.
The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".
Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires.
It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.
> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Imo DEI should have always been based on socioeconomic status over anything else. It'd likely address the other forms of diversity, and would provide way less homogeneity in thought while at the same time providing a sense of inclusion/belonging.
No, it's not hard compared having a good combination of STEM and marketing skills. Many emigrants to the US had no or very few connections: Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, a long list of Indians, Chinese and other Asians.
There is a also merit at the individual level vs merit at the organizational level. e.g. most tech companies are male dominated, but many serve primarily women (Amazon retail, Pinterest, Etsy etc). So having more women in the companies, especially in positions to directly impact the customer experience is important even if we disregard individual merit. Ditto for products that serve primarily minority populations etc.
Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.
The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
I'm a huge opponent of DEI programs. Bend the statistics as you wish, DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. Moreover, I disagree with the statement that diverse communities are better. I work in a very international company and I've noticed that people tend to cluster in groups of similar cultural background because that makes communication much easier.
I have personally been in a situation where I was denied educational opportunities because of my sex. I think that wasn't okay.
> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do
This is an odd phrasing. These are exclusive categories that cover the possibility space†; it makes sense to say that "women are favored over men", but it doesn't make sense to say "men face more discrimination than women". Any number you come up with for "discrimination against men" is necessarily defined relative to the outcomes for women; you can't assign cardinal numbers to both groups.
† Not quite. The possibility space also includes children. They face far, far more discrimination than either men or women do. For example, hiring them is a serious crime.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
This is a coherent claim, but it can't be summarized as "men face more discrimination than women do". Neither (1) nor (2) is an amount of discrimination.
It could be the case, for example, that there are twenty times as many jobs in male-dominated industries as in female-dominated industries, and that men and women apply to these in perfect proportion to their availability.
(Your more specific claim, women do not face any negative discrimination in male-dominated industries, will mean that the amount of negative discrimination faced by women is lower than that faced by men regardless, but this isn't a necessary part of the way you've constructed the question.)
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
Anonymizing names and such is fine/good but the whole push for equal net worth, etc is IMO bad. Granting assistance exclusively to people below the median is equal to punishing those above the median. And if you start adding race, gender, etc it gets even worse. And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
The status quo benefits me, but I also don't see why I owe X to Y. My parents worked hard to get me educated. Their parents worked hard to get them educated. Their parents worked hard to get them their own house. You can stretch it and say they were able to do that because Ys grand...parents got exploited but it's honestly not my problem at this point. We still exploit kids mining in bumfuck nowhere and making phones, everyone cares mostly when they can make an extra buck unless it's straight up death camps.
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant..
The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
> It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
This is extremely funny to hear because it's black Americans screaming bloody murder despite being the citizens of the most powerful country on Earth. White people from poorer countries are told to STFU. And when American companies open offices outside the US, this mindset is carried over. When applying for a position of EU branch of an American company you'll be asked "how much melatonin do you have in your skin" or "do you have a vagina" but nobody will ask you "did you grow up in buttfuck nowhere in Bulgaria with alcoholic parents".
This is exactly why nobody treats DEI seriously. It's not about equality. It's about discriminating white men and choosing statistics that somehow help justify the cause.
> But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households
This is easy to explain on the grounds of ability.
> This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do.
Blacks have very low ability relative to other races. This shows up wherever tests are done. You can look at SATs, state second grade exams, the bar exam, police and firefighter exams, teacher certification exams, NFL Wonderlic results...
This leads them to (a) hold low-paying jobs, and (b) manage the money they do earn badly.
This is acknowledged by proponents of affirmative action under the name "pipeline problem". Whenever you see blacks being selected at disproportionately low rates, it turns out that that's because they are disproportionately unqualified for whatever it is. Those who use the term "pipeline problem" are appealing to the idea that, at some point earlier in the process of being selected, there is a pool of potential future applicants who do not exhibit the disproportionality. (For example, while admitting that black law students are overwhelmingly unqualified to be Supreme Court clerks, you might say that black fourth graders are just as qualified as white fourth graders, and you hope that a reform of the educational system in grades 5 through 19 will change the statistical profile of black law students.) But no such pool has ever been found; the statistically-indistinguishable fourth graders are a myth.
If you think something should be done about this, what do you think should be done about the Jews? They stand in relation to gentiles much as whites stand in relation to blacks.
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.
If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.
GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?
You can see this very visibly in things like the Marines combat fitness tests. [1] In any case where strength is directly involved the requirement for a minimum score for men tends to be near the standards for a max score for women. In that particular test the ammo can lift range is 62-106 for men versus 30-66 for women.
Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.
The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.
Every single time. You look into the source and realize that there's nothing behind the claims.
It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.
But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
I opened the link and searched for "random" and id not find anything. I thought there was going to be something like a randomized controlled trial or similar from what you said but if random does not show up on the search I am not sure what to look for or what you are referring to when you say "Randomized studies". I skimmed the article and did not spot anything that matched, but I may be missing something.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
No because they obviously deserve it for there grand grand grand grand fathers sins and we still live in a patriarchy because 0.01% of men are part of the 1% richest so it's only right to punish the other 99.99%.
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.
If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.
We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
"Keep an open mind; but not so open your brain falls out."
> We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
Funny, I've seen the exact opposite. Nice anecdotes we have here, maybe some real data would be more appropriate in arguments such as these.
And on the flip side, if I look at the state of my (US) government, seems like we've managed to fill it up with lowest-common-denominator stupidity, and most of it is white men (with a smattering of white women here and there). And it certainly seems we're dragging everyone else down with us...
At least in the US, it seems to be the lower-educated, rabidly anti-DEI faction that seems to be dragging everyone else down with them.
> DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
Very, very curious on what basis these claims are being made. Empirical studies would be ideal, but even some anecdotes would be illuminating at this point.
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit.
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
From my side of the coin, I've always thought that the best solution is ground level support.
Ensure that students of any type have excellent public schools. Ensure that people without resources, of any background, have access to higher education. This can be by grants for the very poor, just as it can be by government backed, guaranteed approved student loans.
Healthy, stable food in schools is an excellent way to keep a child's mind on education.
These things level the playing field. There are plenty of white males who need such help to be on a level playing field with wealthier families too. I grew up in a rural community in Canada, and saw many smart but underprivileged(including trouble with keeping food on the table) families end up with grants to go to university.
If you do this, if you provide the capability for merit to shine, and ensure that merit can be fed intellectually, you're doing much of the work required for true equality.
I frankly don't give a rat's ass about women being in any specific field, or someone of whatever skin tone. I do 100% care if people want to, but cannot!! I want all who are capable, to be able to express that capability.
If this is done, and done correctly, then the numbers of candidates applying for jobs will result in numbers indicative of candidates in the field. And more importantly, of people wanting to be in those fields. If you get 11% women in the field, and 11% women applicants, and nothing prevented women from entering that field, you're where you want to be.
We don't need to encourage people to enter a field. We need to only ensure they can if they want to.
This sort of "women are weak and are scared of entering fields" is bizarre, from an equality standpoint. The same for people with different skin tones. Why do people seem to think women, for example, are weak and incapable of pursing their dreams? They are not!
The women I've known in my life have been strong in opinion and in drive, the same goes for people of any racial background. There are of course those that are not, but I've seen lazy, undriven white males too.
People don't need to be prodded, dragged, pulled into a field.
They just need to have no way that they are hindered. They just need the freedom to choose. To know that they can pursue that which they desire.
It's not like a white male cannot get mentored in Python by anybody. By 2019 Python was already one of the most popular languages in the world. Surely any dev on Earth who wants to learn Python has plenty of people and resources at their disposal, and it would take a very good set of reason to turn to the language inventor himself.
I agree that DEI often acts as a fig leave over a whole bunch of other systemic issues, and the European vs American cultural and historical landscapes are already so different as to make any cross-the-pound discussion on DEI extremely hard to navigate, but I still commend the PSF for not taking clearly ideological orders from a funding body. That road would have lead to nothing but trouble.
That's a very software engineer kind of analysis. And a very capitalist one as well. As much as the PSF has a specific goal of improving Python for everyone, human beings should all have a goal of making the world a better place for everyone. Shortest path to narrow outcome is not a recipe for a better world. Increasing equity, prosperity and opportunity for people who may have been shut out in the past is a benefit unto itself. And in terms of who is in of an leg up, the fact is that there are already loads of programs available in the developed world, including the US, that bolster people with specific material deficiency (ie poverty). DEI is specifically meant to overcome prejudice since protections have been lacking for so long.
> The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
Imagine the teacher lines up all the kids, gives them cookies, notices all the kids are boys, so the teacher puts up a sign outside the girls restroom advertising free cookies for anyone who attends math class.
Now the boys have cookies and the girls have cookies.
Except the cookies are not actually cookies, they just represent what you'll learn by attending the class.
That is out reach.
I don't see jocks complaining about fitness outreach programs to geeks. That'd be absurd.
But guys famously will complain about:
1. Women reading science fiction
2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
3. Women playing d&d
4. Women playing online games
5. Women writing code.
To be fair, many women are judgemental about male nurses or even male teachers.
That type of idiocy has to stop both ways. Let people do what they want to do.
If boys always get 4 cookies at home, and girls get none, and then we go to school and boys get 1 more cookie, and girls get 3 cookies, I'd think it was pretty weird that boys get 5 cookies and girls only get 3.
> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).
In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
> Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974.
And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.
> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.
You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly
That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
Your argument is based on the fact that more men naturally gravitate towards STEM than women do. This doesn't mean there aren't still men who could go into STEM but lack motivation/opportunity/some other push. Maybe there are more of them than there is women like that, maybe not.
You are saying it's ok to ignore all those men just because already bigger % of men naturally go into STEM. This is just discriminatory. Just because some people sharing some characteristic with me do better (in this context) doesn't mean I am in position to do better.
This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.
Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
If you were to create a "boys who code" organization and get denied for use of a public space that a "girls who code" org has used, then a) you could sue for use of the space, citing the girls groups' use, and win, or b) you could sue saying that the girls group shouldn't be allowed to use it, and win.
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
its just that human beings aren't writing things using type safe memory checked languages, but i'll just say that they're trying to concatenate and distill a series of supreme court decisions into public policy.
It basically boils down to:
A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need"
B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine.
C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
> We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional.
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
The opinion of the current administration is that DEI is illegal, the language is intentionally implying that DEI is illegal discrimination, because that is the view they are trying to advance. Grants are even being terminated for being related to any sort of diversity topic.
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
From Democratic analyst David Shor back in March ( https://archive.is/kbwom ) : "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]." So, not that it brings me any joy to say it but it would seem more like 55%?
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened.
From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
PSF money does not really go into development. Some inner circle members have been sponsored to do maintenance work, but Python would be largely the same with zero donations.
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
Did it have a claw back clause? If not, then it's quite different than the current situation?
Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
That's a bad idea. Grant fraud is illegal. It'd be easy to use AI to find simple euphemism treadmills, and also to check if the published papers aren't related to the grant that funded them.
This will eventually escalate to large scale prosecutions of academics. And, they will lose, because they are very openly boasting about how they are ignoring the law and even court orders. It was recently discovered that one college had claimed they'd shut down their DEI office but had actually just moved it to a restricted area. This kind of blatant lying is biting the hand that feeds them and will have severe consequences.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.
Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.
I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.
For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.
Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.
The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
Good for them for putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
I’m not American, nor I’ve ever lived there. But I’m not sure what an average Google/Meta employee is supposed to do? Reality is, this is what an average US citizen wants. It’s not like the government was chosen without the support of majority or something.
The government was chosen with the majority, yes. That does not mean that the majority should have its way with everything, nor does it mean that everyone, even those who voted in favor at that time agree and approve of current behavior. I mean, why even hold another election if the majority voted for the current administration? Oh wait...
He got 47%, which is not a majority of the vote. Also, many people decided to just abstain. He got something like 30% of eligible voters to vote for him.
If those tech companies make a habit of funding "pro-DEI" organizations, their contracts with the US government could be jeoparized.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
It is literally quid pro quo right now. you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
"Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." -- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?
Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
I'm watching videos of ICE kidnapping a woman and her kids while shes in their school, to be brought to god knows where, that would not look out of place in the 1930s.
When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.
And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.
I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.
> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.
Good points. And I'd say that also falls into the "put the money where the mouth is" category. We know where both of those things are for them, so we don't have to have any illusions or fantasies.
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
> putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
I have—fortunately—very little personal experience with being extorted by corrupt officials, but I'd wager another facet is to try to ensure all communication is public and recorded.
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?
The PSF and several other organizations that provide public package registries wrote an open letter [1] announcing a joint effort to make this situation more sustainable. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
A business will always tend towards taking the maximum and giving the minimum. Believing anything else is wishful thinking at best and naive at worst.
So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.
I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
Honestly who knows, i wouldn't even trust a lawyer's advice, this administration has shown itself to not be a plain dealer or trustworthy, and willing to weaponize whatever they want to punish whoever they think needs punishing. Past experience of what should be legally enforceable or not does not seem very reliable at present.
This administration is working very hard to make all lawyers redundant. The law doesn't really matter if the court is at the beck and call of the President.
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF might be just fine taking the grant and giving half to Trump personally, but who knows?
Yeah, HN tends toward treating law as less dependent on human application than it is under normal circumstances; with the current practice drifting away from normal circumstances towards “Quod rex vult, lex fit”, that mode of analysis becomes far more dangerously misleading.
It parses however the Trump administration wants it to parse in any particular context on any particular day. Their legal moves have been a shit-show of incompetence and callous disregard for the law.
At the end of the day it’s about making sure any attempt to help, acknowledge, or in any way highlight marginalized groups is branded as discriminating against the administration’s preferred (usually but not always their own) demographic. The nuances don’t really matter to them, the goal is to make sure that happens every time. If you’re talking about the wrong group in a way they deem “bad,” they will ruin your life.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options.
It's a good point that this is a US-based organization, but I don't think the parent is looking for a different focus from this post. Rather, they're asking that given Python's international influence why aren't organizations from more countries (or the countries themselves) contributing? My gut feeling is that it's because the PSF isn't looking outside the US for those sponsors. Here's their sponsor list btw:
> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14.
This might be the bigger story.
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
Yes, it's crazy. I think a lot of people see it as a question of "how can we give the PSF (or orgs like it) more money" but I see it a bit differently. Basically if something like Python can arise and become so effective and useful in so many ways with so little funding (and even less in earlier stages), it suggests that money isn't really the bottleneck here. What we need are people doing good work with good motives and not chasing dollars.
That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.
The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python.
> That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
> I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it
It is definitely a complicated problem but governments tend to but good funding agencies for work that uplifts the broader society and creates the foundation for new markets. That's the idea behind science funding anyways. New science might not create a trillion dollar business directly but it sure lays the funding for new multi billion dollar companies and companies to skyrocket from 500bn to 5T market caps...
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
> I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs
Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.
It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed).
Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.
I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.
In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.
It's a general issue with budgeting grants but at the same time companies need to be talked to in numbers. If there's no known money jar, I don't believe anyone will partake and it'll all get more sketchy. 'Why did money appear for them but not for us?' type of thing
I think people are overlooking the most important part:
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
I would hope another funding source with no interest in this kind of legalistic politics emerges. Conditionality like this is going to be much more common for another 3 years at least.
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
Under discussed is that it should not takes months of work to apply for scientific funding.
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
DEI has always been a weird thing because half the people supposedly doing it were always just trying to curry favor with people in positions of power who supported it, and now that the winds have shifted they're equally happy to curry favor by getting rid of it. They signal virtue or vice depending on how virtuous or vicious the leader.
I think the PSF actually wants to do the right thing, which in the current perverse environment makes them more likely to be targeted. The wisest move is not to play.
Bummer about the funding (and for a small org, almost more importantly the wasted application work), but all around an excellent decision. And a good reference for non-profit backbone.
do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
The government can certainly add restrictions to the use of the grant money, but applying that broadly over any actions the grantee performs during that time is overreach. I wonder about the legality of that condition.
Python doesn't use the GPL, and such a license wouldn't meet the FSF Four Freedoms, nor the OSI Open Source Definition, so it would likely lead to a fork, less usage and less redistribution.
DEI is actually a bit of red herring here. It's worth reading again the commentary from simonw's blog:
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
This is the real problem. It's not about DEI really. It's the same problem as so much else this year: the US government is currently wildly unpredictable and doing business with such an entity is a liability.
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
>> "Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities."
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
Funny how all these DEI proponents never reach out to poor people working manual labor jobs..
If you want "inclusion", include those who you normally exclude instead of including those who you actually want more because they're "culturally compatible".
Of course. DEI is for "community" members from the right families to get jobs through PyCon networks regardless of qualifications.
The leadership is generally white affluent virtue signaling male. A PSF fellow was canceled for pointing exactly that out (at the same time as Tim Peters was canceled).
So it is understandable why they want to preserve DEI but do not go after other economic or corruption or foreign policy failures of this administration --- after all, they have to preserve the same corporate sponsors who also sponsor Trump.
I'm going to say something here that might get me in trouble but I don't really care, this is awful. I've been a programming language developer for over a decade at this point, but I've been programming since I was 6, which was at this point 34 years ago.
In all that time, I've met a lot of people in the tech world, very many of them have been queer, gay, autistic, and/or trans. But there's no community where I've found a greater concentration of LGBTQ people, especially trans people, than in the compilers / pldev community. There's a reason the icon for the Rust discord is the Rust logo superimposed on the LGBTQ flag -- programming languages is disproportionately a field where LGBTQ people gravitate and contribute. I don't know why, but them's the facts.
That means no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, no matter what groups you identify with, LGBTQ people are a driving force in building the tech you use to do your job, to stay connected with your family, to fulfill your creativity and passions, or to even save your life.
And none of them are putting gates on who may or may not use the tech they build. All we are saying is "don't hate us, don't discriminate against us." And yet that's too much for some people.
All this anti-dei nonsense is shooting ourselves in face and the foot. It's counterproductive when we (the communities on on HN) can't get access to vital funding. You think we couldn't have nice things before? Well here we are now, even the PSF is poorer because of this rampant hatred.
Right here, this is why HN as community can't not be political. It's not a tenable proposition anymore. For everyone who downvotes politics stories because they just want to have fun talking about cool tech, it didn't matter one bit that didn't want to engage with politics -- politics has nevertheless engaged with you.
Where we go now I don't know, but what I do know is LGBTQ folx are going to keep building programming languages, this won't stop them. My reaction is that as much as the federal government wants to make America a dangerous place for LGBTQ people, programming language communities should make their space even safer. So sorry everyone who doesn't want to mix woke with their tech, it's not going to get any better for you now that the federal government is anti-trans as a policy. If we're going to be driven into the closet, we're just going to respond by making even more programming languages thank you very much. And our communities will be LGBTQ safe spaces because it's the only place we've got left.
I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
The field is dominated by autistic people, really. Autistic people are often also kinda weird with their sexuality, many times ace, also many times autigender. We are all under that flag, and so even if we may not agree with everything it stands for, we each understand what it means to be excluded for being who we are.
Personally I'm not gay or trans but... let's just say if they were rounding up people for being queer, as people are wont to do, they'd find plenty of reasons to scoop me up. Just being ace is enough for people to get weird about you in some spaces. In LGBTQ spaces it's not really a question.
> Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people?
Oh it's balanced out. There's a whooooole other wing of the PL sphere: the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
> the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
It has high overlap with the rad trad Catholic wing, believe me. I am a fairly traditional Catholic. I had heard of Yarvin via the Haskell world, and was floored when a parishioner at my parish brought him up. Such a strange crossing of worlds.
I imagine by LGBTQ colleagues must have the same feelings at whatever it is they do on Sundays
Honestly I sometimes think I'm the most normal person in the field, but we all probably think that. I think if my colleagues found out that I only go to a traditional Novus Ordo on Sundays where we use a lot of Latin and not a full-fledged Tridentine Mass, all of them would be angry at me. The LGBTQ crowd for being Catholic and the rad-trad crowd fro not being the right kind lol.
But anyway, I guess what I meant with my last point is: where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field? Everyone agrees it attracts the neuro-diverse? Then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to encourage the neuro typical? Imagine how great PLs would be if they were actually eloquent haha.
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
This thread is hilarious. Many independents turned into Never-Trumpers on the first day when he launched the coin scheme and could perfectly see what would happen.
The PSF gets the memo in October 2025 (but still has the same sponsors as the Trump ballroom). Everyone is supposed to laud them for their wisdom and insight and all other opinions are deleted.
Just one thread with these arrogant, incompetent, censorious people and their followers makes you want to vote Vance in 2028 again.
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
No one takes them to jail; companies and organizations can run however they want, unless they break laws.
It doesn't mean that the government that runs and wins on an anti-DEI agenda should give them money.
> Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
I have no idea what point you think you're making, but this happens all the time. Do you really think you should be obligated to let strangers buy into your private business?
Ah yeah you're right. What they actually mean is that DEI is when you build so many equity preference multiples into your term sheets the employee option pool becomes entirely worthless.
Could you clarify that you're suggesting that "it's un-American" for the government to require that the grantee not violate any of its anti-discrimination laws?
Federal money always has lots of strings attached. The specific rules differ by the specific funding vehicle. The main vehicle is the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR); you can review their rule here:
I think people defend anti discrimination or are against it depending on how the anti discrimination policy discriminates discrimination.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
I agree that humans discriminate inherently, although I would argue that what differentiates us is whether we struggle against that impulse.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's probably a reason someone wrote it into the grant agreement, and that they're declaring DEI stands for something other than the familiar Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that funding for research that lead to the various tech powering the modern internet was done only by organizations that never before or since considered trying to source candidates from a variety of places because they believe different viewpoints have value?
Or are you trying to hang this entire thing on a definition of DEI that somehow always and exclusively means illegal race or gender based discrimination (I assume against white men)?
These conversations are so absurd sometimes. I'm baffled by how spitting mad people can decide they are to fight these straw men. Then I'm annoyed by (and suspicious of) the overwhelming silence from most of these sources when it comes to other obvious examples of racial discrimination or things like the government trying to remove history books that mention slavery.
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.
The people who benefited from those who sacrificed for rights and equality over the past century got complacent and lazy.
The current rhetoric is exactly the same as was used to discriminate against my ancestors 100 years ago. The only substitutions are the different slurs. Everyone who wants to talks about race and immigrants should be required to listen to 8 hours of radio programs from the early 1900s saying the exact same thing about them and their ancestors.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
You fight or you lose. Every time; all the time. Politics is a contact sport and you don't get to opt out.
You either think DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others, or that the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
> do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
"Or" means at least one of multiple alternatives. Alteratives contrast with each other, they differ. Of course, the original author could be repeating the same thing for emphasis, but more likely they are saying two different things. Since the second thing is discrimination, the first thing, "DEI", must necessarily not be discrimination. If they merely wanted you to not discriminate, they could have just said "follows federal anti discrimination laws" which are quite stringent.
They are saying the same thing twice. They repeat themselves specifically because certain groups hold a strong belief that "discrimination" only goes one-way, and have effectively twisted the meaning of the word in their minds.
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
That may be what they mean, but it is a sufficiently dubious interpretation that one can't reasonably use it to obtain the funding unless clarification is provided by the administration.
You're free to disagree with anyone here, but playing stupid is only a waste of time. It's not a difficult topic to understand both sides of, regardless of where you come down.
No, the PSF doesn't want to expose its finances to special risk from the Trump Administration’s attempts to paint inclusion as discrimination as a pretext for exerting control that the law itself does not justify over institutions receiving federal funding, finding the risk:reward ratio unjustified for a $1.5M grant. (Note that the actual term purports to prohibit only what the law already prohibits, which is a clue that a naive reading cannot reveal their motive, since under a naive reading they would be equally risk for the behavior that would violate the terms whether or not ot agrees to them or received the grant. So you have to look beyond the agreement to the context of the behavior of the Trump Administration in regards to the issue addressed in the terms and federal funding.)
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, but in principle it can't be applied 'at any point'.
Wow. What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For that kind of money, I would put a large national flag in the banner of the socketcluster.io website, I would relocate HQ to whatever country and state they want. I would never utter the word 'diversity' for the rest of my life and upon receiving the money, I would take a screenshot, frame it, put it up on the back wall of my new office and I would pray to it every morning to give thanks.
> What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For a non-profit backing a community, an important goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability and viability of the org, because the community relies on it to keep infra working, legal representation in place, and other vital needs.
Accepting those $1.5mio would have come with significant "we want that money back" risk, as the post explains. At a $5mio annual budget that could seriously destabilize a small org like this, from the money shortfall to community unrest. Taking this money would be irresponsible.
My two cents, as treasurer of another large FOSS non-profit.
Biden's DEI wave was much more Maoist than Trump 2.0. Not saying this is great either, but stuff like land acknowledgements, "overthrowing the oppressors", etc. sure look a lot like stuff seen in Mao's cultural revolution.
This whole manufacturing of a fear culture, the emphasis on us-vs-them (ICE), loyalty oaths (MIT, pledges of CEOs), purging of institutions (doge), attempts to reorganize higher education (Harvard), control of media (Kimmel), the symbolism (maga), it’s all Trump 2.0 boring attempt at a ‘Cultural Revolution’ a la Mao.
It’s just a bit messier because Trump never commits to much and blatantly chases much of his own selfish interests (crypto schemes and market manipulation).
I believe that the parallels that someone may draw between Biden and Mao are much much weaker.
pypi put out a survey a while back that was full of bs questions about dei fluff. the lack of subject matter made me really question the competence of the project staff.
That’s by design. The Republican Party explicitly desires an America that’s white, male, straight, and complacent. Everyone else just ruins the picture.
Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.
Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.
Welcome to government funding. This is par for course. It's not just dei or anti dei. If you want to take government funding, you have to not read the fine print and swallow hard.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
Note that many universities still have DEI offices. I believe that they are interpreting as described here: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08.... So as long as they can show that they are not doing any of those, they seem to believe that they will be okay.
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):
> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote shown on page 28 in this court case: https://www.scribd.com/document/372802863/18-CIV-00442-ARNE-...
YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte observed the similar racial and sex quotas from the inside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
IBM's CEO infamously championed DEI-as-quota which led to wave of lawsuits that IBM was forced to settle.
The memory holing on this topic is concerning.
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.
So in other words, it went on for a few centuries like I said.
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
How else are they going to balance out all the legacy admissions?
Why does an hard working non-legacy white boy deserve less of a shot than a non-legacy black one? Why should he be penalized because someone else’s father with a comparable skin tan was accepted 25 years ago?
Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.
>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity, if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.
So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.
Hint: if everyone has such anecdotes, they are no longer anecdotes.
That's like saying "the Crusaders weren't real Christians because real Christianity is peaceful"
See also: No True Scotsman Fallacy
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
Your point is well taken. Not everyone was violating the law. But meanwhile Microsoft was setting explicit numeric targets on hiring employees from particular racial groups: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-microsoft-diversity....
Companies were also demanding race-conscious staffing practices at the law firms they used: https://www.wsj.com/business/law-firm-clients-demand-more-bl.... Microsoft offered financial bonuses to law firms for promoting lawyers from specific racial groups: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/If3eb4570033e11eb8e48d387....
> it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law
I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.
What are your sources?
Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".
There was a trial. The government lost. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/21...
That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.
That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.
The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...
Then it shouldn't be hard for you to say something other than 'do your own research'
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
Sure, but you’re god deciding who goes to hell.
Whether something is illegal is only loosely correlated with whether it is common. Eg the war on drugs.
> Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment.
Obviously, it is not fair to discredit all DEI initiatives simply because some of them (possibly a small minority of them) have lead to illegal hiring practices, but it is nonetheless an issue that it happens. That's obviously still true even if it seems entirely antithetical to the point of said initiatives. How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Personally, I feel the existence of illegal discrimination in service of improving diversity numbers felt like it was treated as an open secret for almost as long as I've been working in tech. I honestly figured it was mostly an urban myth, but it does seem to be a recurring problem that needs addressing.
(I also was somewhat skeptical of police ticket quotas being prevalent, as they are routinely brought up in every day conversation despite being illegal in most jurisdictions I've been, but that also turned out to be largely accurate. Color me surprised.)
How much of an issue it really is we can only really postulate, though.
Between the Labor Dept and various think-tanks/economic research groups, there should/could be data.
I suspect there are a small number of very public MegaCorps doing illegal DEI and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
I know from my own employer, DEI is about outreach during recruiting and a combination of training for all employees and providing opportunities for people to gather and talk (via coffee talks and round tables that with DEI topics, but open to all).
I would estimate illegal DEI was happening at more than half of top 100 firms. I’m not as familiar with corporations, but I would be checked if it was less than 25% of Fortune 100s. The HR folks all attend the same conferences together. And the big corps set the permission structure for how everyone else acts.
>I and that’s enough to illicit the backlash we’re seeing.
Gee, it's almost like we're re-learning what the origin of the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety" is.
Unfortunately, it’s trivial these days to gin up the appearance of impropriety even where there is none.
Illegal stuff happens all the time in the workplace and very frequently goes unreported, underreported, or otherwise results in nothing.
Using claims that something is illegal to discredit an argument is extremely dubious.
You have cited a lawsuit (of which there is no recorded outcome, so probably an out-of-court settlement) against the same company that has had to pay millions for discriminating AGAINST women and minorities.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-settles-28...
So maybe one could argue maybe they were not DEI enough!
On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?
My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.
Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.
Disclosure: I work at Google.
[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...
I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
Who's going to start a lawsuit and get blacklisted? HR is normally pushing for this.
No one is brave enough to start such lawsuits. Likelihood of winning too low, first mover disadvantage at play.
That's a lot of whites for a roofing company.
In your mind, if the company had researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for the previous history of the company, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
Suppose you were abused by your parent. How much would it be reasonable for you to abuse your child, in order to balance the scales?
That's a bad metaphor.
It’s a good metaphor. You can’t undo racial discrimination against someone who is now dead by discriminating against someone else who is now alive.
You cannot make a fair system by introducing subjective ideas like historical balance.
A set of rules for fairness require that current decisions only account for individual merit; not special status.
I didn't propose subjective harm in the past, why would you suggest that I did?
But in any case, it seems like your answer is zero, right?
Inverting the privilege pyramid does not make for a balanced and healthy system.
"If countries conscripted only men for thousands of years, for how many thousands of years is it reasonable to conscript only women to balance the scales?"
Okay, so we've established that your upper bound is "less than thousands of years" but what's your lower limit? Or were you just strawmanning?
If these people where actually sincere and not just hiding behind a ideological smokescreen that only benefits them they would be for this same as with DEI in other men dominated jobs like sewage cleaning, road building or other physically taxing but underpaid jobs.
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
I'm a white male, there is zero chance DEI benefits me directly. But I think we all benefit from a diverse society, with female plumbers and electricians, minority software developers, etc. etc.
It's not only not benefitting you but actively putting you at a disadvantage because of the way you where born.
Why do you want it? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
This isn't a thread about what's reasonable, it's a thread about what's legal.
That means a "what's reasonable" question is disallowed?
If that's the case, I do think favoring non-whites and non-males is perfectly okay.
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
Companies know their own historical data and practices best.
I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing? Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have. Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it. Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class. Better what makes better.
> We need the best for the job
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
We think we want the best, and then at hiring time we look for "culture fit", or hire people we already know, or our relatives instead. Then we wonder why everybody is just like us.
> This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
It's hard to take these sorts of complaints seriously unless you can quantify in what percentage of cases we get the bad kind of DEI you describe.
Sure, if 90% of DEI is discriminatory hiring practices, then sure, that's a problem. But if it's 10% instead, then we should certainly call it out, but we should accept that, in any kind of initiative, there's going to be some bad behavior.
(Instead, of course, the right turns it into a culture war topic.)
Given that it was technically illegal (but IMO very common) back then, it's hard to quantify. Usually, they were smart enough to not put the most blatant parts in writing, and of course the same HR departments pushing this were also doing outreach.
All that I can say is that the form of DEI that I, myself, saw and experienced certainly included a lot of the "bad" form, people were justifying it (and some still are in this thread), and it was very clear that daring to criticize it would be a career-limiting move. You can look at the rest of the thread to see both personal anecdotes and further sources showing other large companies doing this.
The way it usually worked was that metrics for diversity hiring were set top down, without specifying how they should be achieved, and then the company openly turned a blind eye to such "bad behavior".
Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
I suspect it works so well as a "culture war topic" because many people have personal experiences not just with such practices, but also with being silenced and gaslit (told that what they experienced doesn't actually happen and is just a culture war topic) when trying to speak out against them.
If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly. I mean if you listen to people here it sounds like companies were absolutely flooded by DEI hires.
It is also quite telling how everyone is up in arms about these discriminatory hiring practices, but the same people don't bat an eyelash about the fact that discrimination happens mostly the other way, I don't know how many studies I've read that showed that cv's with names associated with certain ethnicities have much lower chances to be invited to interview than the same cv with a white name.
> Even with the current backlash, at least I don't have the impression that proponents of DEI will be ostracized and/or fired just for daring to suggest it.
Have you read the actual article?
>If it really was this common how come that the percentages of e.g. blacks in tech jobs didn't actually change significantly.
Because the race based pity hiring programs didn't actually address the pipeline problems.
Did that case ever resolve?
In your mind, if Google researched their past hiring and found that whites/males had been favored for, let's say, the past 15 years, how long would it be reasonable for them to favor minorities and other underrepresented groups to balance the scales?
I personally agree with the PSF that the risk of weird political things happening is too high to risk taking the money under any circumstances. And I have no objection at all if they want to have whoever at PyCon. But there is a double-perspective in the situation you are describing - if this is an unbiased selection process that could reasonably turn up 98% male speakers could be classified as a DEI program. 98% male isn't very diverse.
But on the other hand if the PyCon is achieving 40% female speakers, how could it not be said that there is some pretty heavy bias going on introduced by the outreach process? Unless I turn out to live in a very isolated community of programmers (and internet for that matter) the Python community is far more male skewed than that. Diversity of gender at PyCon almost has to be excluding the actual Python community from the speaker selection process if it has that sort of gender balance. Might be good or bad, but if that is a neutral sampling process then it'd be really interesting to learn where all these python girls are hiding because they aren't applying for developer positions.
Would be fun to also pull up the metric of how many “devrel”, “developer evangelists”, and other professional PR talkers got the stage — versus the actual programmers.
> unusually homogenous communities
Which can be socioeconomic rather than racial..
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Imo DEI should have always been based on socioeconomic status over anything else. It'd likely address the other forms of diversity, and would provide way less homogeneity in thought while at the same time providing a sense of inclusion/belonging.
No, it's not hard compared having a good combination of STEM and marketing skills. Many emigrants to the US had no or very few connections: Elon Musk, Sergei Brin, a long list of Indians, Chinese and other Asians.
There is a also merit at the individual level vs merit at the organizational level. e.g. most tech companies are male dominated, but many serve primarily women (Amazon retail, Pinterest, Etsy etc). So having more women in the companies, especially in positions to directly impact the customer experience is important even if we disregard individual merit. Ditto for products that serve primarily minority populations etc.
Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.
The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
I'm a huge opponent of DEI programs. Bend the statistics as you wish, DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. Moreover, I disagree with the statement that diverse communities are better. I work in a very international company and I've noticed that people tend to cluster in groups of similar cultural background because that makes communication much easier.
I have personally been in a situation where I was denied educational opportunities because of my sex. I think that wasn't okay.
> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375863746_Men_Now_F...
So shouldn't there be more DEI rectifying anti-male discrimination now?
> Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do
This is an odd phrasing. These are exclusive categories that cover the possibility space†; it makes sense to say that "women are favored over men", but it doesn't make sense to say "men face more discrimination than women". Any number you come up with for "discrimination against men" is necessarily defined relative to the outcomes for women; you can't assign cardinal numbers to both groups.
† Not quite. The possibility space also includes children. They face far, far more discrimination than either men or women do. For example, hiring them is a serious crime.
You might expect both
1. discrimination against women in male dominated industries and
2. discrimination against men in female dominated industries.
Studies show that now 2. is worse than 1:
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
> Studies show that now 2. is worse than 1
This is a coherent claim, but it can't be summarized as "men face more discrimination than women do". Neither (1) nor (2) is an amount of discrimination.
It could be the case, for example, that there are twenty times as many jobs in male-dominated industries as in female-dominated industries, and that men and women apply to these in perfect proportion to their availability.
(Your more specific claim, women do not face any negative discrimination in male-dominated industries, will mean that the amount of negative discrimination faced by women is lower than that faced by men regardless, but this isn't a necessary part of the way you've constructed the question.)
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-ra...
2: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
Anonymizing names and such is fine/good but the whole push for equal net worth, etc is IMO bad. Granting assistance exclusively to people below the median is equal to punishing those above the median. And if you start adding race, gender, etc it gets even worse. And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
The status quo benefits me, but I also don't see why I owe X to Y. My parents worked hard to get me educated. Their parents worked hard to get them educated. Their parents worked hard to get them their own house. You can stretch it and say they were able to do that because Ys grand...parents got exploited but it's honestly not my problem at this point. We still exploit kids mining in bumfuck nowhere and making phones, everyone cares mostly when they can make an extra buck unless it's straight up death camps.
> And adding history makes it even more so. Historically everyone has fucked over everyone at some point and many versions exist for many events.
You obviously don't believe we should forget everything in the past, otherwise what does prevent me from taking your stuff today and tomorrow when you come back with the police I'd argue it's in the past "and everyone fucked over everyone at some point". So the question then becomes how far back should we go. Sure you can just say as far as it benefits me, but that is not a solution that works on the scale of a society is it?
One is a crime though. For 'daily' crimes I believe essentially every country has some form of Statute of Limitations. If I decide to pursue a theft 20 years after it happened the courts will tell me to fuck off because it's no longer relevant..
The issue with reparations or w/e though is that it's punishing people who committed no crime for something that's now a crime but back in the day, wasn't, done by their ancestors long enough ago that most have no real life recollection of it anymore.
> It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
This is extremely funny to hear because it's black Americans screaming bloody murder despite being the citizens of the most powerful country on Earth. White people from poorer countries are told to STFU. And when American companies open offices outside the US, this mindset is carried over. When applying for a position of EU branch of an American company you'll be asked "how much melatonin do you have in your skin" or "do you have a vagina" but nobody will ask you "did you grow up in buttfuck nowhere in Bulgaria with alcoholic parents".
This is exactly why nobody treats DEI seriously. It's not about equality. It's about discriminating white men and choosing statistics that somehow help justify the cause.
> But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households
This is easy to explain on the grounds of ability.
> This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do.
Clouds are white. What should we do about that?
> This is easy to explain on the grounds of ability.
What exactly are you suggesting here? If it's easy to explain, can you try to help me understand?
Blacks have very low ability relative to other races. This shows up wherever tests are done. You can look at SATs, state second grade exams, the bar exam, police and firefighter exams, teacher certification exams, NFL Wonderlic results...
This leads them to (a) hold low-paying jobs, and (b) manage the money they do earn badly.
This is acknowledged by proponents of affirmative action under the name "pipeline problem". Whenever you see blacks being selected at disproportionately low rates, it turns out that that's because they are disproportionately unqualified for whatever it is. Those who use the term "pipeline problem" are appealing to the idea that, at some point earlier in the process of being selected, there is a pool of potential future applicants who do not exhibit the disproportionality. (For example, while admitting that black law students are overwhelmingly unqualified to be Supreme Court clerks, you might say that black fourth graders are just as qualified as white fourth graders, and you hope that a reform of the educational system in grades 5 through 19 will change the statistical profile of black law students.) But no such pool has ever been found; the statistically-indistinguishable fourth graders are a myth.
If you think something should be done about this, what do you think should be done about the Jews? They stand in relation to gentiles much as whites stand in relation to blacks.
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
>> (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
> Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
There is no world in which 40% of programmers are women. 1% in 2011 is also probably evidence of discrimination. But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks. There just aren't that many women programmers.
If DEI is all about promoting women in the hopes that they'll succeed later, I could get behind that. But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.
Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.
GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
You know what encourages women to be programmers? Seeing women be programmers.
> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.
I've certainly heard that claim manu times, but never seen it backed up with actual data or even reputable anecdotes. Can you share the sources that led you to this conclusion?
You can see this very visibly in things like the Marines combat fitness tests. [1] In any case where strength is directly involved the requirement for a minimum score for men tends to be near the standards for a max score for women. In that particular test the ammo can lift range is 62-106 for men versus 30-66 for women.
Obviously men are stronger than women and so different standards are reasonable, yet this is also the exact same reason (well, one amongst many) that militaries traditionally did not permit women to participate in direct combat operation. A unit is only as strong as its weakest link.
The US military is now moving towards gender-neutral standards, but that will take one of two forms. If standards are maintained then it will be an implicit ban on women from the most physically intensive roles, or it will be lowered standards for everybody.
[1] - https://www.military.com/military-fitness/marine-corps-fitne...
I'm pretty sure that the effectiveness of a soldier in combat depends on a lot more than just a strength score.
Look at the FAA ATC hiring controversy.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
Everything I've read (that isn't from a blubbering MAGA source) suggests that the "controversy" is entirely manufactured.
Every single time. You look into the source and realize that there's nothing behind the claims.
It's like some people really want to feel angry and accept the most vague or fabricated statements as real facts.
But anytime you sit down and try to go the root of the issue in good faith you realize they really was nothing. Best you can find is someone on Twitter that said something stupid and then they use it as if that means there's a whole apparatus enforcing national wide policy based on that person's tweet.
If you want to make an argument, make it here and cite some primary sources.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
Encouraging specific people to submit applications is not illegal. Even based on those characteristics.
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
You're asserting that the Fair Housing Act applies to tech recruiting?
Securement of a settlement proves literally nothing.
Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375863746_Men_Now_F...
Doesn't that imply there should be more DEI helping men than helping women at this point?
If most DEI is helping women, perhaps the DEI itself is subject to systemic bias?
> Randomized studies show
I opened the link and searched for "random" and id not find anything. I thought there was going to be something like a randomized controlled trial or similar from what you said but if random does not show up on the search I am not sure what to look for or what you are referring to when you say "Randomized studies". I skimmed the article and did not spot anything that matched, but I may be missing something.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
None of the bits you copy-pasted include the word "random" either.
No because they obviously deserve it for there grand grand grand grand fathers sins and we still live in a patriarchy because 0.01% of men are part of the 1% richest so it's only right to punish the other 99.99%.
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33513171/
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959782...
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
There's a whole lot of self-referencing going on in that article (author published in "Queer Majority" and "The Quilette" and not much else...)
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
Not that this is a wholesale defense of DEI initiatives, but what you're describing was exactly the state of affairs before DEI policies.
If I misunderstood your comment as being critical of DEI policies on the basis of being discriminatory along protected characteristics, I apologize in advance.
"The world doesn't run on merit. " Critical systems do.
And we are seeing a slow collapse as a result of the past decade of identity politics.
become more diverse and welcoming over time
We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
"Keep an open mind; but not so open your brain falls out."
> We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.
Funny, I've seen the exact opposite. Nice anecdotes we have here, maybe some real data would be more appropriate in arguments such as these.
And on the flip side, if I look at the state of my (US) government, seems like we've managed to fill it up with lowest-common-denominator stupidity, and most of it is white men (with a smattering of white women here and there). And it certainly seems we're dragging everyone else down with us...
At least in the US, it seems to be the lower-educated, rabidly anti-DEI faction that seems to be dragging everyone else down with them.
> DEI has given the unintelligent a platform on which they can attack the intelligent. The effects of diversity quotas on code quality are horrifying.
Very, very curious on what basis these claims are being made. Empirical studies would be ideal, but even some anecdotes would be illuminating at this point.
And surely you are on the intelligent side?
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit.
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
>>> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity.
It's a remarkably stable system for inequity.
From my side of the coin, I've always thought that the best solution is ground level support.
Ensure that students of any type have excellent public schools. Ensure that people without resources, of any background, have access to higher education. This can be by grants for the very poor, just as it can be by government backed, guaranteed approved student loans.
Healthy, stable food in schools is an excellent way to keep a child's mind on education.
These things level the playing field. There are plenty of white males who need such help to be on a level playing field with wealthier families too. I grew up in a rural community in Canada, and saw many smart but underprivileged(including trouble with keeping food on the table) families end up with grants to go to university.
If you do this, if you provide the capability for merit to shine, and ensure that merit can be fed intellectually, you're doing much of the work required for true equality.
I frankly don't give a rat's ass about women being in any specific field, or someone of whatever skin tone. I do 100% care if people want to, but cannot!! I want all who are capable, to be able to express that capability.
If this is done, and done correctly, then the numbers of candidates applying for jobs will result in numbers indicative of candidates in the field. And more importantly, of people wanting to be in those fields. If you get 11% women in the field, and 11% women applicants, and nothing prevented women from entering that field, you're where you want to be.
We don't need to encourage people to enter a field. We need to only ensure they can if they want to.
This sort of "women are weak and are scared of entering fields" is bizarre, from an equality standpoint. The same for people with different skin tones. Why do people seem to think women, for example, are weak and incapable of pursing their dreams? They are not!
The women I've known in my life have been strong in opinion and in drive, the same goes for people of any racial background. There are of course those that are not, but I've seen lazy, undriven white males too.
People don't need to be prodded, dragged, pulled into a field.
They just need to have no way that they are hindered. They just need the freedom to choose. To know that they can pursue that which they desire.
Support at the ground level does this.
It's not like a white male cannot get mentored in Python by anybody. By 2019 Python was already one of the most popular languages in the world. Surely any dev on Earth who wants to learn Python has plenty of people and resources at their disposal, and it would take a very good set of reason to turn to the language inventor himself.
I agree that DEI often acts as a fig leave over a whole bunch of other systemic issues, and the European vs American cultural and historical landscapes are already so different as to make any cross-the-pound discussion on DEI extremely hard to navigate, but I still commend the PSF for not taking clearly ideological orders from a funding body. That road would have lead to nothing but trouble.
That's a very software engineer kind of analysis. And a very capitalist one as well. As much as the PSF has a specific goal of improving Python for everyone, human beings should all have a goal of making the world a better place for everyone. Shortest path to narrow outcome is not a recipe for a better world. Increasing equity, prosperity and opportunity for people who may have been shut out in the past is a benefit unto itself. And in terms of who is in of an leg up, the fact is that there are already loads of programs available in the developed world, including the US, that bolster people with specific material deficiency (ie poverty). DEI is specifically meant to overcome prejudice since protections have been lacking for so long.
> The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
I appreciate your efforts to support community and people
You are now viewed as a terrorist according to MAGA doctrine. What you did is anti-Trump.
Don't why you are voted down. This is literally the truth.
They don't like being found out.
Sorry. Given the context of the thread
Who is "they" exactly?
Presumably, somebody downvoting that comment. Of course, it doesn't have to be that reason, but if the shoe fits
Cronyism is back on the menu.
You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?
Note that they said:
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
> but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly?
I can see how it might seem weird to an alien who knew what men and women were, but had no context for the existing state and history of society.
I can't see how it would seem weird to anyone else, however.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
Imagine the teacher lines up all the kids, gives them cookies, notices all the kids are boys, so the teacher puts up a sign outside the girls restroom advertising free cookies for anyone who attends math class.
Now the boys have cookies and the girls have cookies.
Except the cookies are not actually cookies, they just represent what you'll learn by attending the class.
That is out reach.
I don't see jocks complaining about fitness outreach programs to geeks. That'd be absurd.
But guys famously will complain about:
1. Women reading science fiction
2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
3. Women playing d&d
4. Women playing online games
5. Women writing code.
To be fair, many women are judgemental about male nurses or even male teachers.
That type of idiocy has to stop both ways. Let people do what they want to do.
If boys always get 4 cookies at home, and girls get none, and then we go to school and boys get 1 more cookie, and girls get 3 cookies, I'd think it was pretty weird that boys get 5 cookies and girls only get 3.
> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).
In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.
What a bizarre analogy...
If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM, STEM graduates have been majority female for decades.
Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
> Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974.
And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.
> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.
You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.
Wow, way to make up words that the person you're replying to never said, and then arguing with them.
Bad-faith arguments seem to be your shtick, given your comment history on this post.
Erm…accounting is STEM via the M by many modern definitions.
Accounting is not a branch of mathematics.
Accounting is applied mathematics.
If that would make it count as STEM, you could just rename STEM to M because STE is arguably all just applied mathematics.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
You've never heard of programs to encourage men to be nurses or teachers? I certainly have.
Here's what I found after a quick search. If you're interested I'm sure you could research and find more information.
https://www.arizonacollege.edu/blog/men-wanted-new-efforts-t...
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
https://www.belmont.edu/stories/articles/2025/men-in-educati...
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly
That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
Your argument is based on the fact that more men naturally gravitate towards STEM than women do. This doesn't mean there aren't still men who could go into STEM but lack motivation/opportunity/some other push. Maybe there are more of them than there is women like that, maybe not. You are saying it's ok to ignore all those men just because already bigger % of men naturally go into STEM. This is just discriminatory. Just because some people sharing some characteristic with me do better (in this context) doesn't mean I am in position to do better.
This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.
It's fun that you say 'naturally' when there have been centuries of oppression and conditioning against women in STEM.
So we shouldn’t focus on helping a subset of people because doing so is discriminatory to everyone else?
Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
I believe you are always allowed to create a club "boys who code" if that's something you are interested in.
If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
If you were to create a "boys who code" organization and get denied for use of a public space that a "girls who code" org has used, then a) you could sue for use of the space, citing the girls groups' use, and win, or b) you could sue saying that the girls group shouldn't be allowed to use it, and win.
So what about the girl scouts, is that also discriminatory?
Yes, there was an entire supreme court case about that 30 years ago, a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts I might add.
That was against the boy scouts but the reverse lawsuit hasn't been filed against the girl scouts to my knowledge.
That said, law in the US and one’s opinions on what constitutes discrimination are different things.
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
Could the foundation take the money and sit on it in bonds or some other safe instrument? Call it an "endowment"?
$1.5M at 4% is nice.
But I suppose the "proposal" means these funds come with a distribution plan attached?
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
The text is:
> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
its just that human beings aren't writing things using type safe memory checked languages, but i'll just say that they're trying to concatenate and distill a series of supreme court decisions into public policy.
It basically boils down to: A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need" B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine. C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
> We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional.
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
Sure, but the executive order is not a law.
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
You say that confidently like that's an obstacle to executive power in 2025.
The opinion of the current administration is that DEI is illegal, the language is intentionally implying that DEI is illegal discrimination, because that is the view they are trying to advance. Grants are even being terminated for being related to any sort of diversity topic.
Grants are terminated based on keyword matches.
they'd have to be extra careful with cpython, it's got a lot of include
The conjunction used is "or". It could mean either.
My reading in context is different: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08...
That's a different, non-governmental website?
That was labor lawyers interpreting a governmental memorandum about the same issue substantially or precisely.
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
If it’s not “DEI” then it’s “waste fraud and abuse”. And if it’s not that then it’s “terrorism” or “treason”.
“Anti-semitism” if it involves colleges in any way, don’t forget that!
Who, in 2025, is still giving the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the rule of law?
As I’ve said in the past: they need the benefit of the doubt on everything; they deserve the benefit of the doubt on nothing.
A non-trivial amount of people in this thread, sadly. Many of which are leaving comments like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727967
Roughly half of the country, give or take.
Roughly 40% supports Trump, but they are often quite loud about putting other things above the rule of law.
Not sure why you think roughly 50% give him the benefit of the doubt on dedication to the rule of law.
From Democratic analyst David Shor back in March ( https://archive.is/kbwom ) : "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]." So, not that it brings me any joy to say it but it would seem more like 55%?
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
*Roughly 40% of the country, give or take. Don't be complacent.
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
I wonder, how likely do you think there would be a retaliatory threat of revoking PSF’s nonprofit status for a perceived snub in rejecting the offer?
The IRS has withheld 501(c) status from the president’s perceived adversaries before[0]. But I haven’t heard of 501(c) status being revoked.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/154584-ig-audit-of-irs-ac...
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-comi...
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened. From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
PSF money does not really go into development. Some inner circle members have been sponsored to do maintenance work, but Python would be largely the same with zero donations.
Pretty bold statement with no evidence.
Here's some evidence that he is, again, badmouthing the PSF without a good reason: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-psfs-2024-annual-im...
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
it never had a claw back clause -- that is the real problem here. And we've seen that the Trump admin is willing to actually claw back granted funds.
not at all the same
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
Did it have a claw back clause? If not, then it's quite different than the current situation?
Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.
Seems you comment agrees with the parent.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
That's a bad idea. Grant fraud is illegal. It'd be easy to use AI to find simple euphemism treadmills, and also to check if the published papers aren't related to the grant that funded them.
This will eventually escalate to large scale prosecutions of academics. And, they will lose, because they are very openly boasting about how they are ignoring the law and even court orders. It was recently discovered that one college had claimed they'd shut down their DEI office but had actually just moved it to a restricted area. This kind of blatant lying is biting the hand that feeds them and will have severe consequences.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
It's also worth pointing out that despite this thread being full of ridiculously low quality posts, I haven't flagged any of them. That's the sort of thing DEI leftists do, not everyone.
Even on HN, we're still human and hungry for controversy.
The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.
And maybe they'll get that back eventually, but academia can't complain about rough handling when it steadfastly refused as a bloc to fix its own ways for so long. Outsiders trying to fix them will always create a lot more collateral damage than insiders fixing the problems, but when insiders refuse, outsiders will take over.
Also, frankly, I heard a bunch of such stories and very often the grantees were misrepresenting their work. It actually did have DEI content in it and they were pretending it didn't. You can see how many people in this thread are arguing that all you have to do to comply with the requirements are use a thesaurus or misrepresent their work and then continue anyway. For as long as academics insist on total warfare and malicious compliance, expect universities to be blowtorched.
I should have been clear that it’s particularly with respect to word choice. All of the research we’re doing is accurately described by the proposal. It’s just codified in this weird new way of speaking where you can’t say certain trigger words which offend the snowflakes up top.
For me personally, I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not. We’re doing research into how to improve the healthcare and quality of life of less privileged groups. Our work is about helping people, full stop. It’s one of the best ways I could ever want my tax money being spent.
> I really don’t care if it’s grant fraud or not.
Right, academics think they're above the law and that it's OK to lie to conservatives to advance their agendas. So why should anyone believe you, when you say it's all above board? If you don't care about engaging in financial fraud you don't care about misrepresenting things on Hacker News either, for sure.
The culture of dishonesty and extremism in academia is why it will eventually be liquidated. Expect to see academic funding driven to zero and university property seized in future. There will be no more academics. It'll take years, but mass lawlessness of that kind won't be tolerated forever.
Is the restriction on grantees not violating federal law a new one, or has it been around for ages?
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
Grant agreements are not statutes but contracts, and canons of statutory interpretation do not apply to contracts.
Perhaps a better source (but IANAL):
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
> It has no weight; it is inoperative.
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
[1]https://coag.gov/press-releases/weiser-sues-hhs-kennedy-publ... [2]https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/state-c... [3]https://www.k12dive.com/news/state-lawsuit-Education-Departm...
It would be very good for the PSF if it can get grant money without DEI things. Before you needed to have them to get much of a look-in.
Now it can spend the money on important stuff like packaging. uv is amazing, but also a symptom of the wrong people stewarding that money.
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
Good for them for putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
> They’ve already chosen a side in this fight
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
Remember doing and saying nothing is a choice.
I’m not American, nor I’ve ever lived there. But I’m not sure what an average Google/Meta employee is supposed to do? Reality is, this is what an average US citizen wants. It’s not like the government was chosen without the support of majority or something.
The government was chosen with the majority, yes. That does not mean that the majority should have its way with everything, nor does it mean that everyone, even those who voted in favor at that time agree and approve of current behavior. I mean, why even hold another election if the majority voted for the current administration? Oh wait...
He got 47%, which is not a majority of the vote. Also, many people decided to just abstain. He got something like 30% of eligible voters to vote for him.
If those tech companies make a habit of funding "pro-DEI" organizations, their contracts with the US government could be jeoparized.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
It is literally quid pro quo right now. you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.
> I don't blame them as such.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
I'm watching videos of ICE kidnapping a woman and her kids while shes in their school, to be brought to god knows where, that would not look out of place in the 1930s.
When you have a full time secret police that wanders the streets kidnapping people, yeah that has a chilling effect, people want to keep their heads down.
And its tricky, because they will ignore the huge protests, and they want some sort of armed or civil disobedience when it comes to their secret police because they are looking for excuses to label them Antifa terrorists and escalate.
I don't see the obvious play here for Americans looking to fight this. Maybe the Midterms could help, maybe if enough local action, maybe the US to too big to cow like that, maybe the blue states have enough independence to survive the federal overreach, maybe Trump dies and MAGA dies with him.
> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.
Good points. And I'd say that also falls into the "put the money where the mouth is" category. We know where both of those things are for them, so we don't have to have any illusions or fantasies.
Also, Apple, and T-Mobile.
I thought Germany still frowned on policies like Trump’s, though I suppose demolishing the White House was on its todo list at some point in the past.
Sorry, I think they're probably all out of funds after chipping in for Trump's new royal ballroom.
Somebody probably really wanted a spot in the new bunker beneath the ballroom.
Can’t. The money went to pay for the Trump’s new ballroom…
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
> putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
I have—fortunately—very little personal experience with being extorted by corrupt officials, but I'd wager another facet is to try to ensure all communication is public and recorded.
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?
The PSF and several other organizations that provide public package registries wrote an open letter [1] announcing a joint effort to make this situation more sustainable. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
[1]: https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-n...
Thanks! I want to bring this up as a discussion point when I get the chance at work.
I can't find a date on this letter - is it recent?
Get your company to take the Pledge: https://opensourcepledge.com/
It says "September 23, 2025" right at the top.
The website hides the date on mobile
The date is at the top of the letter and in the url...
September 2025.
I'm rather baffled at the spike in HN folks missing obvious dates. You're not the first..
I wonder if they're mobile. Here the URL is truncated and over on openssf.org/blog they don't show the date unless you switch over to desktop view.
I'm on mobile and missed it. My bad for the spam.
The website hides the date on mobile
From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
A business will always tend towards taking the maximum and giving the minimum. Believing anything else is wishful thinking at best and naive at worst.
So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.
I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
Yeah it looks like about 1500 grants:
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
> I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
The Executive branch can make any claim it wants, but the Judiciary branch has the authority to decide what a reviewable claim means.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
Ok? But that wasn't the OP's argument. Did you reply to the wrong thread?
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
> "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
Honestly who knows, i wouldn't even trust a lawyer's advice, this administration has shown itself to not be a plain dealer or trustworthy, and willing to weaponize whatever they want to punish whoever they think needs punishing. Past experience of what should be legally enforceable or not does not seem very reliable at present.
I'd assume it parses however the US government wants it to parse.
Lawyers wouldn't have as much job security if commas didn't matter some of the time
This administration is working very hard to make all lawyers redundant. The law doesn't really matter if the court is at the beck and call of the President.
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF might be just fine taking the grant and giving half to Trump personally, but who knows?
Yeah, HN tends toward treating law as less dependent on human application than it is under normal circumstances; with the current practice drifting away from normal circumstances towards “Quod rex vult, lex fit”, that mode of analysis becomes far more dangerously misleading.
It parses however the Trump administration wants it to parse in any particular context on any particular day. Their legal moves have been a shit-show of incompetence and callous disregard for the law.
At the end of the day it’s about making sure any attempt to help, acknowledge, or in any way highlight marginalized groups is branded as discriminating against the administration’s preferred (usually but not always their own) demographic. The nuances don’t really matter to them, the goal is to make sure that happens every time. If you’re talking about the wrong group in a way they deem “bad,” they will ruin your life.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
More details on the underlying project that the grant would have funded: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
And for those who want to fund the security of one of the few remaining independent foundation-led package ecosystems:
https://www.python.org/psf/donations/
https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options.
(Not an American.)
It's a US-based organization discussing funding from the US government. Why would you expect a different focus in an article about that funding?
It's a good point that this is a US-based organization, but I don't think the parent is looking for a different focus from this post. Rather, they're asking that given Python's international influence why aren't organizations from more countries (or the countries themselves) contributing? My gut feeling is that it's because the PSF isn't looking outside the US for those sponsors. Here's their sponsor list btw:
https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
For some context on the scale of this grant, the PSF took in only $1M in "Contributions, Membership Dues, & Grants" in 2024: https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
Yes, it's crazy. I think a lot of people see it as a question of "how can we give the PSF (or orgs like it) more money" but I see it a bit differently. Basically if something like Python can arise and become so effective and useful in so many ways with so little funding (and even less in earlier stages), it suggests that money isn't really the bottleneck here. What we need are people doing good work with good motives and not chasing dollars.
That in turn suggests that a lot of money currently being spent is wasted, or worse, used for ill. We would be better served by taking all the assets of the Fortune 500 and distributing them widely to tons of little groups. Some of those groups may turn out to be the next Python, and for the ones that don't, well, we didn't waste much money on them. Right now what we get instead is hundreds of billions of dollars going to advertising algorithms.
The reason it's crazy that the PSF survives on $5 million isn't that $5 million is crazy little, it's that too many other entities are crazy big.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. > That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
What is most scary to me, is that these grants are not opportunistic (money is raised when needed), they are on an enveloppe basis (the amount to be distributed is fixed).
Essentially that means for every dollar not spent on, say, the PSF; then an other organization willing to denounce DEI is going to get these $1.5M.
I fear less for the opportunity loss to _proper_ organizations, and worry that activist anti-DEI/partisan organizations are artificially going to get a massive funding increase.
In that setup, it may be the lesser of two evils for the PSF to accept that grant, if only to deny a more partisan organization to get this funding.
It's a general issue with budgeting grants but at the same time companies need to be talked to in numbers. If there's no known money jar, I don't believe anyone will partake and it'll all get more sketchy. 'Why did money appear for them but not for us?' type of thing
I think people are overlooking the most important part:
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
Read to the end. Ways to financially support this important work can be found there.
Step One: get them to a better payment processor than PayPal! I waded through it, but that's a high friction funnel.
I made a donation. Props to the PSF for standing up.
I would hope another funding source with no interest in this kind of legalistic politics emerges. Conditionality like this is going to be much more common for another 3 years at least.
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
This is what happens when people who take things seriously take seriously things said by people who don’t take things seriously.
DEI has become such a contentious term that we should consider retiring it, in my opinion.
Renaming your ideological movement because most people don't like what it stands for won't change peoples opinion.
Under discussed is that it should not takes months of work to apply for scientific funding.
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
It's the right move.
DEI has always been a weird thing because half the people supposedly doing it were always just trying to curry favor with people in positions of power who supported it, and now that the winds have shifted they're equally happy to curry favor by getting rid of it. They signal virtue or vice depending on how virtuous or vicious the leader.
I think the PSF actually wants to do the right thing, which in the current perverse environment makes them more likely to be targeted. The wisest move is not to play.
The government didn’t have to spend more money, and this organization didn’t have to take money with strings attached they didn’t like…
It seems like a win-win to me
Bummer about the funding (and for a small org, almost more importantly the wasted application work), but all around an excellent decision. And a good reference for non-profit backbone.
Time to amp up my Xmas donation.
I wonder if we need a GPL v4 that revokes itself if the end user violates other people’s human rights.
That way, this sort of situation would result in the revocation of the python license, instead of the grant proposal.
Python doesn't use the GPL, and such a license wouldn't meet the FSF Four Freedoms, nor the OSI Open Source Definition, so it would likely lead to a fork, less usage and less redistribution.
Bold and right decision!
Six million is peanuts for guiding probably the most popular language on the planet these days
I mean is OSS effective despite the funding problem, or if we gave every maintainer a million quid, would they all stop making tough decisions ?
I suspect that it’s the organisations that define the decision quality - but that’s just a hunch.
That's what we like to hear! Read to the end and donate!
DEI is racist. It's picking people because of skin color instead of merit.
Under the grant rules programming languages must be strongly typed. No strings identifying as an int, etc. :-)
DEI is actually a bit of red herring here. It's worth reading again the commentary from simonw's blog:
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
This is the real problem. It's not about DEI really. It's the same problem as so much else this year: the US government is currently wildly unpredictable and doing business with such an entity is a liability.
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
Anyway, I signed up to be a PSF member.
>> "Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities."
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
Donated, and happy to.
It's shocking how fast this administration has gotten institutions to abandon their beliefs, and ones that don't should be rewarded.
Makes me wonder what strings were attached to that Allen AI NSF grant. I noticed that they were suddenly using more hawkish language around China.
Great job from PSF ! Taking the stand rather them submitting themselves to dictatorial/thought-policing terms.
Funny how all these DEI proponents never reach out to poor people working manual labor jobs..
If you want "inclusion", include those who you normally exclude instead of including those who you actually want more because they're "culturally compatible".
Of course. DEI is for "community" members from the right families to get jobs through PyCon networks regardless of qualifications.
The leadership is generally white affluent virtue signaling male. A PSF fellow was canceled for pointing exactly that out (at the same time as Tim Peters was canceled).
So it is understandable why they want to preserve DEI but do not go after other economic or corruption or foreign policy failures of this administration --- after all, they have to preserve the same corporate sponsors who also sponsor Trump.
Now that's what a backbone looks like.
I'm going to say something here that might get me in trouble but I don't really care, this is awful. I've been a programming language developer for over a decade at this point, but I've been programming since I was 6, which was at this point 34 years ago.
In all that time, I've met a lot of people in the tech world, very many of them have been queer, gay, autistic, and/or trans. But there's no community where I've found a greater concentration of LGBTQ people, especially trans people, than in the compilers / pldev community. There's a reason the icon for the Rust discord is the Rust logo superimposed on the LGBTQ flag -- programming languages is disproportionately a field where LGBTQ people gravitate and contribute. I don't know why, but them's the facts.
That means no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, no matter what groups you identify with, LGBTQ people are a driving force in building the tech you use to do your job, to stay connected with your family, to fulfill your creativity and passions, or to even save your life.
And none of them are putting gates on who may or may not use the tech they build. All we are saying is "don't hate us, don't discriminate against us." And yet that's too much for some people.
All this anti-dei nonsense is shooting ourselves in face and the foot. It's counterproductive when we (the communities on on HN) can't get access to vital funding. You think we couldn't have nice things before? Well here we are now, even the PSF is poorer because of this rampant hatred.
Right here, this is why HN as community can't not be political. It's not a tenable proposition anymore. For everyone who downvotes politics stories because they just want to have fun talking about cool tech, it didn't matter one bit that didn't want to engage with politics -- politics has nevertheless engaged with you.
Where we go now I don't know, but what I do know is LGBTQ folx are going to keep building programming languages, this won't stop them. My reaction is that as much as the federal government wants to make America a dangerous place for LGBTQ people, programming language communities should make their space even safer. So sorry everyone who doesn't want to mix woke with their tech, it's not going to get any better for you now that the federal government is anti-trans as a policy. If we're going to be driven into the closet, we're just going to respond by making even more programming languages thank you very much. And our communities will be LGBTQ safe spaces because it's the only place we've got left.
I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
Well welcome to the club..
The field is dominated by autistic people, really. Autistic people are often also kinda weird with their sexuality, many times ace, also many times autigender. We are all under that flag, and so even if we may not agree with everything it stands for, we each understand what it means to be excluded for being who we are.
Personally I'm not gay or trans but... let's just say if they were rounding up people for being queer, as people are wont to do, they'd find plenty of reasons to scoop me up. Just being ace is enough for people to get weird about you in some spaces. In LGBTQ spaces it's not really a question.
> Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people?
Oh it's balanced out. There's a whooooole other wing of the PL sphere: the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
> the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
It has high overlap with the rad trad Catholic wing, believe me. I am a fairly traditional Catholic. I had heard of Yarvin via the Haskell world, and was floored when a parishioner at my parish brought him up. Such a strange crossing of worlds.
I imagine by LGBTQ colleagues must have the same feelings at whatever it is they do on Sundays
Honestly I sometimes think I'm the most normal person in the field, but we all probably think that. I think if my colleagues found out that I only go to a traditional Novus Ordo on Sundays where we use a lot of Latin and not a full-fledged Tridentine Mass, all of them would be angry at me. The LGBTQ crowd for being Catholic and the rad-trad crowd fro not being the right kind lol.
But anyway, I guess what I meant with my last point is: where are the diversity initiatives to get 'normal' people into this field? Everyone agrees it attracts the neuro-diverse? Then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to encourage the neuro typical? Imagine how great PLs would be if they were actually eloquent haha.
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
This thread is hilarious. Many independents turned into Never-Trumpers on the first day when he launched the coin scheme and could perfectly see what would happen.
The PSF gets the memo in October 2025 (but still has the same sponsors as the Trump ballroom). Everyone is supposed to laud them for their wisdom and insight and all other opinions are deleted.
Just one thread with these arrogant, incompetent, censorious people and their followers makes you want to vote Vance in 2028 again.
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
Anti-DEI forces, once in power, turn out not to favor putative “diversity of opinion” after all.
Spelling things out helps with the euphemisms.
Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion forces turn out to be (gasp) against all of diversity, and equity, and inclusion.
No one takes them to jail; companies and organizations can run however they want, unless they break laws. It doesn't mean that the government that runs and wins on an anti-DEI agenda should give them money.
> Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
Agreed. And it is... quite revealing that many people in these comments are so insistent to view the text in isolation.
> discriminatory equity ideology
Isn't that when you let your mates buy into your corrupt private investment vehicles for cheap?
I have no idea what point you think you're making, but this happens all the time. Do you really think you should be obligated to let strangers buy into your private business?
Ah yeah you're right. What they actually mean is that DEI is when you build so many equity preference multiples into your term sheets the employee option pool becomes entirely worthless.
And do really think they think that?
I understand what you're driving at but at this stage of the game it's quite American.
Could you clarify that you're suggesting that "it's un-American" for the government to require that the grantee not violate any of its anti-discrimination laws?
> "[yadda yadda yadda] in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Should not be a new or surprising statement at all in this type of thing, let alone a question of if it's un-American.
> The government dictating how you run your business ?
Yes, these terms are usually called "laws", you might've heard of them.
Federal money always has lots of strings attached. The specific rules differ by the specific funding vehicle. The main vehicle is the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR); you can review their rule here:
https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-52
This is basically the US Federal Government’s standard Master Services Agreement (MSA).
I think people defend anti discrimination or are against it depending on how the anti discrimination policy discriminates discrimination.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
I agree that humans discriminate inherently, although I would argue that what differentiates us is whether we struggle against that impulse.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
> Is that even legal to
Does it matter for the Trump administration what is legal and what isn't?
The fascist language is a no-op because it optimizes to: "don't violate federal laws" which presumably is reasonable.
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's probably a reason someone wrote it into the grant agreement, and that they're declaring DEI stands for something other than the familiar Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Federal funding of research is un-American.
> Federal funding of research is un-American.
Federal funding of research created the Internet that you are posting this idiocy on.
Before you attack the last poster, he does have a point. Federal funding of powers that belong to states is unamerican.
I agree. The gvt should not care if DEI is used, or if someone is gay or transgender m
Oh really? So what pro-DEI requirements did the federal funding for that grant require?
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that funding for research that lead to the various tech powering the modern internet was done only by organizations that never before or since considered trying to source candidates from a variety of places because they believe different viewpoints have value?
Or are you trying to hang this entire thing on a definition of DEI that somehow always and exclusively means illegal race or gender based discrimination (I assume against white men)?
These conversations are so absurd sometimes. I'm baffled by how spitting mad people can decide they are to fight these straw men. Then I'm annoyed by (and suspicious of) the overwhelming silence from most of these sources when it comes to other obvious examples of racial discrimination or things like the government trying to remove history books that mention slavery.
These things don't look like good faith to me.
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
the original idea of DEI "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" is good but it got twisted. it became the rally crying for the other side.
God, it is so humiliating to be an American these days. :(
I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.
What's happening guys?
About 50 years of slow deliberate destruction of the country's trust in institutions and trustworthy media and communications systems and culture.
I think people were worn down over many years by traditional politicians and just wanted something different
And then someone came in and took advantage of that
This, and most people still don't realize it. It goes back to Nixon and Roger Ailes.
Yes, that is 100% the moment I had in mind when I said 50 years.
> What's happening guys?
The people who benefited from those who sacrificed for rights and equality over the past century got complacent and lazy.
The current rhetoric is exactly the same as was used to discriminate against my ancestors 100 years ago. The only substitutions are the different slurs. Everyone who wants to talks about race and immigrants should be required to listen to 8 hours of radio programs from the early 1900s saying the exact same thing about them and their ancestors.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." -- John Philpot Curran, 1790
You fight or you lose. Every time; all the time. Politics is a contact sport and you don't get to opt out.
You either think DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others, or that the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
Uh, what?
There's no contradiction, or even tension, between these three positions:
1. "DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others"
2. "the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better"
3. "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
so what exactly are you trying to say?
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
DEI programs are fundamentally racist. You don't fix racism with more racism.
How do you fix racism?
Not by continuing to use racism, just flipped the other way. That just created more resentment and anger, and eventually hate.
> do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
No you are not reading this correctly, but I suspect that was willful
> No you are not reading this correctly
Okay, so can you help me interpret that correctly, then? What other conclusion should I draw from this?
"Or" means at least one of multiple alternatives. Alteratives contrast with each other, they differ. Of course, the original author could be repeating the same thing for emphasis, but more likely they are saying two different things. Since the second thing is discrimination, the first thing, "DEI", must necessarily not be discrimination. If they merely wanted you to not discriminate, they could have just said "follows federal anti discrimination laws" which are quite stringent.
They are saying the same thing twice. They repeat themselves specifically because certain groups hold a strong belief that "discrimination" only goes one-way, and have effectively twisted the meaning of the word in their minds.
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
That may be what they mean, but it is a sufficiently dubious interpretation that one can't reasonably use it to obtain the funding unless clarification is provided by the administration.
You're free to disagree with anyone here, but playing stupid is only a waste of time. It's not a difficult topic to understand both sides of, regardless of where you come down.
No, the PSF doesn't want to expose its finances to special risk from the Trump Administration’s attempts to paint inclusion as discrimination as a pretext for exerting control that the law itself does not justify over institutions receiving federal funding, finding the risk:reward ratio unjustified for a $1.5M grant. (Note that the actual term purports to prohibit only what the law already prohibits, which is a clue that a naive reading cannot reveal their motive, since under a naive reading they would be equally risk for the behavior that would violate the terms whether or not ot agrees to them or received the grant. So you have to look beyond the agreement to the context of the behavior of the Trump Administration in regards to the issue addressed in the terms and federal funding.)
Oh come on.
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, but in principle it can't be applied 'at any point'.
Appreciate it. I still wouldn't take the risk tbh, not with the current administration's terrible track record on stuff like this.
Anyone that signs something like this either can't read or hired lawyers that can't read.
Wow. What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For that kind of money, I would put a large national flag in the banner of the socketcluster.io website, I would relocate HQ to whatever country and state they want. I would never utter the word 'diversity' for the rest of my life and upon receiving the money, I would take a screenshot, frame it, put it up on the back wall of my new office and I would pray to it every morning to give thanks.
> What luxury some people have to reject $1.5 million.
For a non-profit backing a community, an important goal is to ensure the long-term sustainability and viability of the org, because the community relies on it to keep infra working, legal representation in place, and other vital needs.
Accepting those $1.5mio would have come with significant "we want that money back" risk, as the post explains. At a $5mio annual budget that could seriously destabilize a small org like this, from the money shortfall to community unrest. Taking this money would be irresponsible.
My two cents, as treasurer of another large FOSS non-profit.
Good game. Trump 2.0’s Maoism is becoming boring.
Biden's DEI wave was much more Maoist than Trump 2.0. Not saying this is great either, but stuff like land acknowledgements, "overthrowing the oppressors", etc. sure look a lot like stuff seen in Mao's cultural revolution.
In what way?
This whole manufacturing of a fear culture, the emphasis on us-vs-them (ICE), loyalty oaths (MIT, pledges of CEOs), purging of institutions (doge), attempts to reorganize higher education (Harvard), control of media (Kimmel), the symbolism (maga), it’s all Trump 2.0 boring attempt at a ‘Cultural Revolution’ a la Mao. It’s just a bit messier because Trump never commits to much and blatantly chases much of his own selfish interests (crypto schemes and market manipulation).
I believe that the parallels that someone may draw between Biden and Mao are much much weaker.
pypi put out a survey a while back that was full of bs questions about dei fluff. the lack of subject matter made me really question the competence of the project staff.
This hurts two things at once: people and security.
Anti-DEI clauses push out under-represented contributors, and the lost funding delays protections millions rely on.
Shame on the decision-makers who made that tradeoff.
That’s by design. The Republican Party explicitly desires an America that’s white, male, straight, and complacent. Everyone else just ruins the picture.
Choosing to advocate your personal political beliefs over the interests of your organization should be grounds for dismissal.
Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.
Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
According to recent events of this US administration, there are two things that could follow after a court decides in favor of the PSF:
* They will ignore it and still claw back the money, with force if needed
* They go higher and higher through the courts until it lands on the table of the supreme court that conveniently sides with the administration.
You can't win a fight in the system. Law is broken and not reliable anymore.
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.
Welcome to government funding. This is par for course. It's not just dei or anti dei. If you want to take government funding, you have to not read the fine print and swallow hard.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
thats not true....
https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...
All of those are marked as "PURCHASE ORDER", I don't think the PSF applies for those. I don't think they are what one would consider funding
Grants are at the bottom.
The grants to the 'University of Georgia Research Foundation'?
rip... You are right. Sorry. I exported it into excel and just looked at the column... interesting they have the same UEI?
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
Thanks for posting this. I just made a donation to the PSF.
Confused about this decision. Why not take the money and then do only DEI activities that don't break the law?
Because that wouldn't allow them to use the PSF as a front for their political activism.
Some predictions on how the current admin is going to probably retaliate for the PSF withdrawing their proposal:
* IRS audit into the PSF's 501c3 status
* if the PSF has received federal funds in the past, they'll probably be targeted by the DOJ's "Civil Rights Fraud Initiative"
* pressure on corporate sponsors, especially those that are federal contractors
Note that many universities still have DEI offices. I believe that they are interpreting as described here: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08.... So as long as they can show that they are not doing any of those, they seem to believe that they will be okay.
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...
Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":
- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
It was not temporary. The victims spent substantial amounts of money suing and still lost: https://www.eenews.net/articles/appeals-court-says-epa-can-r.... Technically litigation is ongoing but there is no reason to believe they will succeed.
> discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
Striving for equality according to MAGA is discrimination. Make systematic racism and sexism great again like it’s <1950s?
Racism and sexism is illegal under Federal anti-discrimination laws.