The woke rampage continues to plough its way through everything from academia, journalism, and social media, now venturing assertively into the realm of science. In response to the recommended reappraisal of terms such as male and female in the scientific field, critics have sprung into action, cautioning against ditching traditional terms for the sake of inclusivity. Bending over backwards for the sake of "increasing inclusion and equity" could leave science lacking precision, they were cited by several US and UK media outlets as saying.
Earlier, a group of researchers in the United States and Canada strongly suggested opting for terms such as "sperm-producing" or "egg-producing" in science to dodge promoting “heteronormative views.” The words "male" and "female," they argued, should be ditched, as they assume sex is binary.
“Much of western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture,” members of the group wrote in a paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
Participants of the EEB (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) Language Project pride themselves on championing inclusive terminology, as their website states.
The EEB Language Project, which includes three University of British Columbia researchers, Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor, Dr. Alex Moore, and Dr. Danielle Ignace, has vowed to provide resources and support a plethora of actions aimed at reevaluating "harmful" terminology, be it at the level of individuals, institutions, or broader scientific communities.
“The project started as a Twitter conversation among a few people discussing potentially harmful terminology,” according to Dr. Gaynor, one of the authors of the paper.
"Male" and "female" are by far not the only terms the group of scientists intends to wage war on. Their website includes a list of the "top 24 harmful terms," where one can come across words like "mother," "father," "primitive," "invasive" and even “survival of the fittest.” The latter, in case you are puzzled to see how it ruffled their feathers the wrong way, was argued as being linked to “eugenics, ableism and social Darwinism.”
Instead of the term “citizen science,” which the group contended could be “harmful to non-citizens,” it was suggested to use "participant science or community science."
One critic of such re-engineering of language, Professor Frank Furedi of the University of Kent in the UK, was cited as saying:
“I think that when you characterise terms like male/female, mother/father as harmful you are abandoning science for ideological advocacy. Regardless of intent, the project of re-engineering language will cause confusion to many and the last thing that scientists need is a lack of clarity about the meaning of the words they use,” the professor stated.