What happens when DEI becomes DOA in the aerospace industry?

As part of the executive order, US companies with federal contracts and grants must certify that they no longer have any DEI hiring practices. Preferentially hiring some interns from a pool that includes women or minorities is such a practice. Effectively, then, any private aerospace company that receives federal funding, or intends to one day, would likely be barred under the executive order from engaging with these kinds of fellowships in the future.

US companies are scrambling to determine how best to comply with the executive order in many ways, said Emily Calandrelli, an engineer and prominent science communicator. After the order went into effect, some large defense contractor companies, including Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) went so far as to cancel internal employee resource groups, including everything from group chats to meetings among women at the company that served to foster a sense of community. When Calandrelli asked Lockheed about this decision, the company confirmed it had "paused" these resource group activities to "align with the new executive order."

An unwelcoming environment

For women and minorities, Calandrelli said, this creates an unwelcoming environment.

"You want to go where you are celebrated and wanted, not where you are tolerated," she said. "That sense of belonging is going to take a hit. It's going to be harder to recruit women and keep women."

This is not just a problem for women and minorities, but for everyone, Calandrelli said. The aerospace industry is competing with others for top engineering talent. Prospective engineers who feel unwanted in aerospace, as well as women and minorities working for space companies today, may find the salary and environment more welcoming at Apple or Google or elsewhere in the tech industry. That's a problem for the US Space Force and other areas of the government seeking to ensure the US space industry retains its lead in satellite technology, launch, communications and other aspects of space that touch every part of life on Earth.