The Broader Impact of Broader Impacts: Scientists & their Diversity Props

For years as a Black woman in theoretical cosmology wondering where the heck the other Black women in theoretical physics were, I thought about what this country was doing to make me the loneliest number of one. There are a bunch of obvious things like economic and environmental racism, mass incarceration, state violence, interpersonal racism and how all of those structural features of our society add up to hold Black people back.

But as a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF), one of the most prestigious honors granted to an American graduate student in the sciences, I knew also that specific structures had supposedly been put into place that could help mitigate some of these things. For example, 50% of the criteria used to evaluate any NSF proposal fall under the header of Broader Impacts, as in the broader impact to society of the principle investigator’s work.

Now, I’m not naive. I remember that when my officemates and I were working on our GRF applications, a couple bragged about phoning it in on the Broader Impacts criteria. That people didn’t always take them seriously was something I understood from early on. On the other hand, I got the fellowship and none of them did. They almost certainly had better grades, potentially better letters of recommendation and maybe even better scientific proposals than me. So, I reasoned that I did better because I talked about leveraging what I had learned as a working class Black woman to change my field for the better.

(I would say I’ve been making good on that, by the way.)

Twelve years later, I now have over a decade of experience in the world of “diversity work,” which I often call the “diversity racket” these days. I’ve also been on a couple of NSF panels, so I’ve had a chance to see not just how other people at the graduate, postdoc and faculty levels deploy Broader Impacts but also how these proposals are read by postdocs and faculty in my and related fields. Here’s what I’ve learned:

Principle investigators sure do love to use people of color and to a lesser extent white women as props in their proposals. What I imagined what my officemates had lazily done all those years ago in Santa Cruz is what passes for a “strong proposal” these days. And when I as a member of a significantly underrepresented minority have criticized these proposals for what I see as fairly basic weaknesses, it is both infuriating and fascinating to watch white panelists close ranks, defensively. I can’t say anymore than that because I am strictly bound by confidentiality.

I can say this though: this is the funding base of the diversity racket. “You mention ‘underrepresented minorities’ or ‘women,’ we give you cash.” It’s not quite that crude, at least not all the time. The prevailing attitude is that white women and people of color especially should be grateful that we were thought of and as long as the idea seems doable, that’s it, you’re good to go. It doesn’t matter if there’s no proof that your program works to increase participation in the long term or even short term!

To be fair, the Broader Impacts criteria can be met in an assortment of ways, for example through outreach to the general public, through making connections between the research and work in a completely unrelated field, through innovating undergraduate or graduate pedagogy. It is not necessary to mention women or other underrepresented groups (URGs). And it’s also the case that if you are too, too casual, everyone hates it. But the bar isn’t super high. With a tiny bit of effort, you too can meet it!

Here’s the question that doesn’t get asked though: what is the National Science Board, which sets the NSF’s standards, doing when it says, “If you do these things for these marginalized groups, we will give you money”? Yeah, I get that on the surface they are “incentivizing.” But what exactly are they incentivizing? In practice, it seems that they are incentivizing using marginalized people as props in their proposals. We are a commodity whose identities are traded on even though we may never benefit.

There are no checks as to whether you actually ever recruit URG students even though you said you would “try” to.

Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that NSF program managers are not empowered to check, reprimand or ensure there are consequences to the next application for funding if people never lift a finger. And by the way, none of this is the fault of program managers. In my experience they are great, and I wish Congress would give them more money to hand out and also the power to force panelists to undergo training.

Ultimately, this provides significant feedback into the physics and astronomy communities. It becomes acceptable to write off a daily commitment to improving the environment for underrepresented groups by saying, “Well, I run this and this program,” or “I had a Black student last summer.” Scientists seriously think that their participation in these programs mitigates personal responsibility for when they do something that harms marginalized people. For example, if a marginalized person or one of their allies says, “hey, you said something oppressive,” it’s almost a guarantee that someone will come to their defense by saying, “This person has been great for that community over the years.”

The acceptance of the deployment of the Broader Impacts criterion which I have described effectively rubber stamps this phenomenon. “Hey, I wrote something like that along with a strong science proposal and someone gave me $500,000. They even wrote in the reviews that I met the broader impacts criteria because I mentioned doing X with URG Y. It must be good enough!”

So anyway, this is maybe all a long winded way of saying I think I understand why I’m the only one in my field. It turns out my GRE general scores were several sigma higher than the average for my demographic group, so I met some cut-offs there. I went to Harvard. I mysteriously stuck it out despite regularly being treated like shit. I didn’t need to benefit from someone’s broader impact program during the academic year, although I highly suspect that a few people I worked for during college talked about me in their proposals and benefited from my presence.

Broader Impacts criteria, whatever they were meant to do, may not necessarily do much for people like me and increasing the presence of people like me in the field in the long term. That’s a huge problem. It should also be super embarrassing, not just because we should have criteria that work but also because as scientists we should do work that is guided by the data.

What works? Probably panelists should know that before handing out millions of dollars. Probably that should be part of the evaluation the next time people apply: did they do something and did it work? Broader impacts, specifically measurable by short term and long term metrics, should be included in discussions of previous work and what was achieved with the public money that they were given.

I emphasize that it’s public money for the following reason. I shouldn’t have to remind everyone, but since I’m Black I will: this country’s wealth was built on the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans and on the genocide and labor of Black slaves. More recently, millions of undocumented workers from Latin America and elsewhere pay taxes even though they can’t benefit from many programs. Meanwhile, LGBTI people have been paying taxes even when our government didn’t protect us from a life of shame in the closet. That federal money you are getting? It’s thanks to us. Designing programming to counterbalance all the ways that we have been locked out of equity in American society isn’t charity: it’s paying us a small fraction of the inherited wealth that we are owed.