The U.S. Air Force has taken down online content celebrating female aviators in an effort to comply with federal directives to remove DEI material from government websites.
Although I do support the removal of DEI material, this is taking that too far. Congratulations to both women for their accomplishments, and any other women in aviation, military or civilian. I just finished recurrent in the jet I fly and was paired with a very sharp lady as a sim partner. She knew her stuff and the airplane, which made my recurrent training that much easier considering we had never flown together prior to this training event.
Erasing women from military history isn’t streamlining. It’s disrespect, denial, and deeply rooted discrimination against those who served with honor.
Get a grip folks. The site is undergoing maintenance,
The U.S. Air Force has taken down the online content that celebrated ALL of their past aviators. I’m sure all past teams will be posted again later with the years that they served.
So Matt, when you say you support the removal of DEI material, which parts of DEI do you support removing? Do you support removing diversity? Do you support removing equity? Do you support removing inclusion? Or do you support removing all of the above? And do you support removing diversity, equity and inclusion only until you don’t because doing so inconveniently adversely affects a new found colleague whom you unexpectedly came to respect for their technical performance?
I believe in merit based standards, not standards based on racial, gender, or other quotas. DEI is just another name for what used to be “affirmative action”, which has already been held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court long before the current administration in office now. In aviation lives depend on being able to meet those standards. Lowering those standards or qualifications to meet a political quota just makes the job of those who did harder, along with putting more lives in jeopardy.
We all believe in merit based standards not based on race, gender or quotas.
I’m old enough to remember in first person that what you derogatorily cite as “affirmative action” came about because merit based standards were predominantly applied to straight while males, the premise being that anyone other than a straight while male most likely couldn’t (read shouldn’t be presumed to be able to) meet merit based standards. Specifically that included women, men and women of skin color other than caucasian and men and women of sexual orientation other than heterosexual. So pease no lecturing on the vices of “affirmative action”. And by the way, I was impressed with female technical performance in sims long before you were.
Speaking of merit based standards, the same secretary of defense which has taken down content honoring the first female Thunderbird pilot is also the one and the same secretary of defense who communicated details about airstrikes on Houthis via a non-secure communication channel with a news reporter on the distribution list. How does that square with your high merit based standards?
And one more time, I’ll repeat my original questions which you evaded. Which of diversity, equity, or inclusion are you against? Or is the answer all of the above?
@Arthur_Foyt: This isn’t routine maintenance. The content honoring women like Nicole Malachowski, the WASPs, and others wasn’t randomly taken down, it was deliberately scrubbed under Executive Order 14151. Calling it temporary misses the point. Once stories are labeled “DEI,” they become fair game for deletion, not preservation. And once it’s gone from the record, it rarely comes back the same, if at all.
All of them as far as Im concerned. There should be no quotas where one is discarded and replaced with someone else to meet the numbers game. Merit and that is all.
By the way with the mental disease TDS which is rampant in the US and the world, if I was one of them, I would willfully scrub the very existence of celebrating women in the armed forces just to show how bad the Trump administration is in execution of policy and ideology.
When folks push back on DEI, especially on fairness and inclusion, it’s often coming from a place of wanting to hang on to how things used to be. Maybe they don’t mean to, but a lot of that old setup gave white men most of the power by default. It’s not always about bad intentions, it’s just that change can feel uncomfortable when you’re used to being on top of the pile.
And one more thing. The idea that DEI means “hiring the substandard” is BS. It comes from bias, misunderstanding, and fear of change. DEI doesn’t lower standards, it expands opportunity by removing unfair barriers. It helps qualified people from all backgrounds get a fair shot, not a free pass, not a handout.
DEI, as I understand it, was weaponized Affirmative Action. You can quietly unwind the aspects of government bullying that was a defining aspect of DEI without replacing it with more government bullying and the unfair tarring of anyone who was given a chance to succeed and excelled as less qualified because of their sex or race.
Heck, most of Trump’s Cabinet are only there because they have great hair with little if anything beneath it. Is that DEI in Washington?
Remember TDS,Trump Derangement Syndrome. It seems like it’s mutated into many other types of derangement syndrome.
I’m still trying to figure out what harm was done and what good this does.
And, maybe there are those in the loop that are removing things they know will cause this kind of controversial stir to stop the whole “clean up DEI” program. You know there is a lot of DEI garbage that should be removed, but not true accomplishments of anyone should ever be removed. If she earned it, she should keep it.
Proving you have no idea what DEI is and how it works. DEI is NOT a quote system and, contrary to your belief, it is merit based.
Rhetoric and opinion are not facts.
DEI does in fact lead to unfair hiring and retention decisions. As a Lead LCP training new pilots I can tell you the standards absolutely have changed. Years ago many of the new pilots I fly with wouldn’t have even made it through sim training and would have never seen the real aircraft. Now depending on who you are, I’ve seen as much as 150 hours of OE given to one student who still could barely operate the aircraft safely and most of them are out there on the line flying today.
Like it or not, hiring and retention shouldn’t be based on anything other than qualifications and skill but the past 10 years has changed all of that.
I call BS! The simple concept and implementation of hiring using DEI may not create a quota, but it creates unfair hiring practices. No one should ever be hired or retained based on skin color, regardless what color the skin is, PERIOD.
Well, of course, AVWeb chose to omit the backstory here. The Newsweek article hints to it: “The Department of Defense admitted that some content was removed by mistake and has restored parts of it after public backlash.” In other such cases from early this year, some snarky, TDS-suffering bureaucrats purges way more than was ever intended by DOGE, for instance mention of the Tuskegee Airmen. They knew that their dupes in the media would jump on the opportunity to spin this into criticism of the person who beat their candidate last November. What is missing though in the discussion are the countless real cases of reverse discrimination that have occurred in government hiring since the early 1970s. Malachowski and I share quite a bit from our early years - started flying (on my own nickel) as a teen. I was also cadet commander of my AFJROTC unit in high school. Excelled academically and in sports. But I am a white Christian male from the South with no connections to politicians or USAF veteran parents. My USAF Academy recruiter admitted in 1975 that my chances of getting an appointment were somewhere between slim and none due to my skin color and sex and lack of connections to USAFA. So be it, injustice happens, I sucked it up and have had a great life, family, and career.
Let’s say you need to hire 100 people. You get 200 qualified applicants. When you hire your 100 is it wrong to try to hire a diverse group of people from those 200 qualified applicants? Perhaps your company caters mainly to women? Would you perhaps want a mostly female workforce? If you company sells to average Americans, maybe you’d want your workforce to look like them - (hint: that’s only 30% white males). I’ve been through DEI training twice. None of it was about reducing standards. All of it was about making the organization more productive by learning how to work together with people who weren’t exactly like me. That said, there are probably some exceptions and excesses out there. They should be corrected with a scalpel, not a chainsaw. Aviation today is much more diverse than it was even 20 years ago. I welcome that.
Your ignorance is palpable. I would explain it to you, but you have no desire to be moved slightly outside the bubble you live in.