Want to Celebrate Women’s History Month? Stop the Anti-DEI Rollbacks
At the close of this year's Women's History Month, President Danielle R. Holley examines recent "anti-DEI" initiatives and argues they are direct assaults on the education, health and ability of women to participate fully in civic and professional life.
As we close this Women’s History Month, the usual commemorations feel increasingly at odds with a chilling reality: the hard-won progress of the last century is under immediate and systematic threat.
When leaders across the country claim that recent efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are about neutrality or fairness, everyone should pay close attention. What is happening under the banner of “anti-DEI” is not neutral; it is a direct assault on the education, health and ability of women to participate fully in civic and professional life.
These initiatives function as a coordinated rollback of women’s progress. As the president of Mount Holyoke College — an institution founded on the radical premise that those marginalized by gender deserve a seat at the table — I see these actions as a clear signal of systematic exclusion.
Some of the most alarming and underreported trends are both the hostility toward research on women’s health and the erosion of frameworks designed to ensure gender equity and to combat systemic discrimination in the workforce.
Women’s health research is crucial for the nation and the world. For decades, women were excluded from clinical trials, leaving gaps in medical knowledge that continue to affect diagnosis and treatment today. Treating women-centered research as “ideological” or “unscientific” is not fiscal responsibility; it is negligence that puts lives at risk.
Federal funding for issues that disproportionately affect women (such as maternal health, reproductive health, autoimmune disease and gender-based violence) has been frozen, cut or placed under suspicion as “identity-based.” Health and Human Services staff have reportedly been directed to disapprove grants containing the word “women,” a move that stalls the treatment of diseases that affect women differently than men.
The administration has also attempted to cancel the Women’s Health Initiative, a decades-long study estimated to have prevented 126,000 breast cancer cases and 76,000 cases of cardiovascular disease in women. And that’s not all: funding has been pulled for critical research on female-specific issues such as menopause and uterine fibroids.
Anti-DEI attacks are also dismantling the structures that allow women to participate equitably in the economy and male-dominated professions. These initiatives are not “special favors,” but corrective measures to centuries of exclusion.
At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Women in Engineering Club was disbanded, removing a critical support structure for women in a heavily male-dominated field. There are active threats to end the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, the only federal agency mandated to advance economic opportunity for working women. (The Department of Labor was once helmed by Mount Holyoke alum Frances Perkins, the first female U.S. cabinet secretary.) The government has already eliminated the Gender Policy Council, which was designed to coordinate federal efforts to combat systemic discrimination and increase economic security.
Institutions like Mount Holyoke exist because women were once explicitly excluded from higher education under the guise that our education was “unnecessary” or “destabilizing.” To erase these programs and protections now is not a return to fairness; it is a return to inequality.
America’s strength has always come from expanding opportunity, not shrinking it. We do not honor our legacy by pretending inequality has disappeared or by silencing the tools that help us confront it. This Women’s History Month, all of us –– not just those who have been marginalized because of our gender –– must be willing to protect the progress that made equal participation possible in the first place. The government must not give lip service to trailblazing women; they must make supportive actions and reinstate previous initiatives. They would do well to remember that women are fully half of the population.
History will remember how we meet this moment.