Stephanie M. Lee

@stephaniemlee.bsky.social

15034 Followers 1281 Following

Senior writer at @chronicle.com, writing about scholarship, scholars, and society. stephanie.lee@chronicle.com / Signal: stephaniemlee.07 / stephaniemlee.com / San Francisco

The same language from Bhattacharya’s email appears in other recent NIH documents. Last week, an official at the agency sent me a copy of a draft policy that, if published, would prohibit the collection of all data on people’s gender (as opposed to their sex) by any of the agency’s researchers and grantees, regardless of their field of study. It allows for an exception only when the consideration of gender is “scientifically justified.” The gender-data policy was uploaded to an internal portal typically reserved for agency guidance that is about to be published, but has since been removed. (Its existence was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.) When reached for comment, an HHS official told The Atlantic that the policy had been shot down by NIH leadership, but declined to provide any further details on the timing of that shift, or who, exactly, had been involved in the policy’s drafting or dismissal.