Equality, equity, diversity, parity and discrimination

Western societies move every day further in the direction of “equality”, in particular “gender equality”. Quotas are enforced to ensure we move as far as possible towards “parity”: committees, commissions, panels, governing bodies must be composed of the same number of women and men. Decision-makers seem obsessed by the idea of being possibly accused of discrimination.

We face the same move in science, despite the highly different representation of women in different fields. When women are under-represented, enforcing parity means those women have to participate in many more commissions, juries etc. than do men; an example where equality contradicts equity. One may wonder if those women are happy to be solicited because of their gender, rather than just because of their skills. The will to enforce parity in science implicitly means to assume we are guilty – of discrimination – until innocence is proved. I grew up believing that scientists are among the most open-minded people: another dream fading away?

Discrimination seems today the worst felony unless it is “positive”, of course. The relentless effort to fight some discrimination by fellow scientists in the governing bodies makes an astonishing contrast with the deafening silence against other discriminations. The next European Crystallographic Meeting will be held in Versailles, France, and will be off limits not only for a number of bona fide scientists: the COVID-unvaccinated ones, but also for all those who come from countries where “vaccines” different from those authorized by the European Union are used; Russian scientists and scientists from Northern Africa are just two examples. Neither the ECA nor the IUCr has said a single word against such discrimination. The IUCr Congress and General Assembly of 2023 will be held in Melbourne, where the zero-COVID policy has enforced a severe deprivation of freedom and where freedom of speech is today brutally repressed when it comes to the “vaccines”, as live video recordings continue to show. Who can believe that the participation of bona fide scientists will be guaranteed under these circumstances? The Congress website carefully shows compliance with the “gender equality and diversity” policy of the IUCr; not a word, instead, about the restrictions that will prevent the participation of all the bona fide scientists who do not comply with the enforcement of periodic injections.

Fully absorbed in the noble task of building a better, equal, diverse world, we are blindly running towards a Brave New World. Whistle-blowers are accused of promoting conspiracy theories. Humanity has already seen this in the past, and we know how it ended.

Editor's note: We do not want political correctness to rule science, crystallography or the IUCr but we should be open to change. We (the IUCr) have always led the way in "equal opportunity" and this is what we should still advocate. The IUCr is and wants to be known for building connections between scientists, not for destroying them. We do not want to discriminate.