Backfire R

I experienced all of this firsthand, having entered graduate school in 2013. By 2020, I watched non-white colleagues with CVs a tiny fraction as strong as mine absolutely swamped with interview requests and job offers, while I couldn't even secure a preliminary phone interview. I saw a non-white, female biologists with zero peer-reviewed publications receive a tenure-track job offer from an Ivy League university within minutes of defending her PhD thesis. This would have been utterly incomprehensible in years prior, as such positions are typically only given to well-established academics with a long and very high impact publication record. To call this demoralizing would be a dramatic understatement. Combine my sex and race with the fact that I refused to write the woke DEI statements that most universities had begun requiring, due to my strong moral opposition to DEI ideology, and landing a tenure-track position at a respectable university began to feel like a pipe dream. I also watched many exceptionally smart and talented white male undergraduates abandon their aspirations of becoming academic scientists. They understood what was happening and chose career paths where success would still be tied to competence rather than sex and race.