The Government is Shortchanging Our Best Lady Scientists

There’s a real gender disparity when it’s time to renew grants, according to one study.

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-383673616/stock-vector-woman-in-despair-clutching-her-head.html?src=csl_recent_image-1">Visual Generation</a>/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A new study looking at gender bias in funding for scientific research has found that women are at a disadvantage when they apply to renew funding from the National Institutes of Health. According to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gender stereotypes may lead scientific reviewers to require higher-quality work from female grant applicants compared with men. The result? Some female scientists are held back from advancing in their careers.

“We’re all bombarded by messages telling us that men are strong and more logical than women and women are kind and more compassionate,” said Anna Kaatz, the study’s lead author. “Because fields like science and medicine have been traditionally dominated by men, competence and ability in those fields are linked to male-type traits.”

According to Kaatz, NIH research project grants are “the most important thing in advancing your career.” They also have to be renewed every few years—often at the same time young medical school professors are coming up for tenure. When a professor applies to renew an NIH research grant, experts from the professor’s field of study give the application a numeric score accompanied by a written critique. The NIH then decides whether to fund the project based in part on those expert recommendations. To find out if gender bias influenced whose funding was renewed, the UW-Madison researchers identified positive and negative words in a small sample of critiques over four years and compared the results by gender. Among successful applications, reviewers tended to be more positive in describing the work of female applicants than they were describing the work of males, even though the NIH renewed funding for more men than women.

The results of their findings, published this month in Academic Medicine, suggest that “reviewers require higher quality work from [women] to confirm they have the competence to carry out the task,” Kaatz says. And for some women who lost research funding because they couldn’t meet that extra-high bar, the lack of funding may be forcing them out of the field.

The consequences of this bias extend beyond the individual careers of the professors. Kaatz suggests there is a connection between the importance of NIH funding in career advancement and “the higher rates of attrition and slower rates of advancement observed for women nationally in academic medicine.” Fewer women in higher positions, she says, “perpetuates health disparities, compromises workforce diversity and scientific innovation, and ultimately disadvantages the United States in the global economy for science and technology.”

In a letter to Mother Jones following the publication of this article, two NIH staff noted that the government agency has conducted its own study on NIH grant funding—with a larger sample size than the UW-Madison study—and found no “important differences in outcomes for women and men.”
 
“Our work is far from done, as we continue to explore with rigorous scientific methods gender and other disparities—such that we can erase them toward benefiting the public’s health,” the NIH wrote.

Here’s how the effect plays out.

Clarification: An earlier version of this article misstated the NIH reviewers’ relationship to the agency. Additionally, the NIH wrote to Mother Jones after this story was published, and their response has been in part included in this article.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate