A prominent US scientific society altered its website to remove references to diversity and equity ― terms targeted by the administration of US President Donald Trump. Articles about scientists who are members of under-represented groups also temporarily vanished from the site, although they have since reappeared.

The editing sparked an outcry among some of the more than 37,000 members of the organization, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in Washington DC. Some ASM members note that other scientific societies have posted statements in support of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), rather than deleting terms targeted by White House orders.

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“I feel sad, mad, disappointed,” says Carla Bonilla, a biologist at the University of San Diego, California, who was born in El Salvador. An article about her on the ASM website was briefly replaced with a notice saying ‘Under review’ before being restored. Bonilla has been a member of the ASM since 2015, and says that it had always been consistent in its support for scientists from diverse backgrounds. But now, she says, it feels “like they are trying to hide me”.

In an e-mail, ASM president Theresa Koehler told Nature that the organization had followed legal advice to review all of its webpages, in the hope of protecting its federally funded programmes. But Koehler acknowledged that the organization should have alerted members to the review. “We realize that our poor communication has hurt and confused people,” wrote Koehler. “We will learn from this, and we will do better.”

Targeted terminology

The ASM took action after Trump ordered federal agencies to end “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes and to take down websites and other public platforms that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology”. In response, numerous US agencies took steps to scrub terms mentioned in Trump’s orders from their websites and from research papers under review. Trump’s directives extended beyond the federal government: he also told federal officials to identify “large non-profit corporations or associations” that have DEI programmes as targets for investigation.

In the first few days of February, scientists began noticing changes to the ASM’s website. For example, the page for the ASM’s ‘Inclusive Diversity with Equity, Access and Accountability Committee’ morphed into a page for a ‘Progress, Impact, Access and Accountability Committee’.

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The phrase “other marginalized groups in science and health care” was replaced with “other groups in science and health care” in an article on the ASM website titled ‘Women in the History of Antimicrobial Development’, which was written by Jennifer Goff, a microbiologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. The original language was restored within hours of its removal, but “it’s particularly concerning that alterations were made to articles without contacting the authors to ask for permission”, says microbiologist and ASM member Sean Gibbons at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington.

An article on the ASM website featuring Juliet Johnston, an environmental microbiologist at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, who identifies as a pansexual transgender woman, was temporarily taken down and replaced with an ‘under review’ notice. The ASM has been supportive of her in the past, Johnston says, but its recent actions make its commitment to diversity feel “very hollow”, and that “it’s going to take a while to earn trust back for them”.