Stand Against U.S. Research Censorship
Funding freezes and female erasure do not pass here.
On 20 January 2025, the President of the United States issued Executive Order 14151 ending all DEI programs within government agencies around the world. The very next day, Executive Order 14173 which prohibits DEI programs in American corporations and organizations.
The NIH, CDC, and other government agencies have been scraping their archives and changing the language in published research. NASA started removing profiles on female astronomers. Global health care aid for women and girls has ground to a halt thanks to an administration they did not vote for.
Add to this censorship confusion — words like “woman,” “female,” and “disability” have been scrubbed from research and agency websites, but an official list has yet to emerge. Researchers and leaders are hunting in the dark, uncertain how to proceed with (or work around) these limitations.
It’s not so long ago that women were banned from clinical trials in the United States. The ban lasted from 1977-1993, during the period of time when a significant number of the world’s drugs were developed, leading to a legacy of adverse reactions for women.
We at Asterisk Women’s Health condem in the strongest terms the erasure of women, LGBTQ+, POC, and disabled persons from research and literature.
We will not bend
We at Asterisk are building the first female-generated and female-only symptoms database for women’s non-reproductive health research.
Clinicians, journalists, femtech leaders, and other aligned organizations can access our database without ever declaring gendered terms. They will have access to female data and female trial participants no matter what.
Other resources
We believe community is the best way forward. Community equals resiliancy and resources. Here are some other projects to follow or engage with to fight this blatant censorship.
→ Women Refusing to be Erased — a website promoting women in STEM, sharing research, and maintaining a list of acts against women emparted by the U.S. government.
→ End of Term Web Archive — this website archives pages from government websites that are taken down during administration transitions. Anything you think is missing from current sites might be found here.
→ Open Environmental Data — preserves and shares research on climate change and environmental protections. This is another sector that has lost ground in the current administration, and health is directly linked to the environment.
→ Data Rescue Project — a group working to preserve government datasets and research that is threatened by censorship.
→ Data Hoarding — the motherlode of data and research archives. If you’re missing a resource, they probably have it.
Got a resource we didn’t list? Please share it!