Author: Bethany Brookshire / Source: Science News
Women face an uphill battle in biomedical science, on many fronts.
There is bias in hiring and in how other scientists view their research. Fewer women are chosen to review scientific papers. Men still outnumber women at the ivory tower’s highest floors, and of course, women in science face harassment based on their gender. But once the top of the hill is in sight — once a female scientist gets a coveted major research grant — the playing field levels out, a new study shows. Women who get major grants stay funded and head their labs just as long as men. The hitch? Women must reach the top of the academic hill and apply for those grants in the first place.“We’ve known from the data that’s publicly available that women are getting approximately 50 percent or more of the biomedical Ph.D.s, but when the time comes to apply for grants, the number drops precipitously,” says Judith Greenberg, the deputy director of the National Institute of General Medical Science in Bethesda, Md. Less than one-third of first-time applicants for the big grants from the National Institutes of Health are women.
In part, that number reflects the gender disparity in faculty positions in general. To get a big pot of money from the NIH, a scientist needs to have a position at an eligible institution, often a university.
That’s not a trivial goal. For example, women received 53 percent of the Ph.D.s in biology in 2015. But in that same year women represented only 44 percent of assistant professors in biology, and only 35 percent of the full professorate.Getting the money is crucial; science doesn’t happen without materials and people. “It costs a lot of money,” Greenberg explains. An NIH grant for several hundred thousand dollars per year pays for supplies and equipment, from a single mouse to a large expensive instrument. It pays for graduate students, postdocs and technicians. It even pays part of the scientist’s salary. “If you have grant support, you can do research,” Greenberg says. “If you lose grant support for any period of time, you’re out of the system.”
In many ways, getting that first big NIH grant is a sign that a biomedical scientist has arrived. Greenberg and her colleagues wondered if there were gender differences in those grant recipients, and how long those scientists remained funded. They gathered data on grants funded by the NIH over nearly 20 years, from 1991 to 2010, funds that kept a total of 34,770 scientists (and their labs) in business.
Greenberg and her colleagues didn’t just look at a single grant submission, they also looked at whether that grant was renewed five years later. “A lab’s project is typically funded for four or five years,” she explains. “But during…
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