Increased Use of the Childcare Cost Support Policy by National Research Service Award (NRSA) Fellows in FY 2023

Support for families at critical periods is a known reason why some researchers, especially female and underrepresented scientists, leave research careers (see these articles from Academic Medicine and FASEB). For this reason, NIH has developed and implemented family-friendly policies aimed at supporting early-career researchers. One of these policies provides up to $2,500 in childcare cost support to full-time National Research Service Award (NRSA) fellows and trainees. In 2022, we shared some preliminary data on how many NRSA fellows requested and were issued these awards. Today, we are pleased to update these data for individual fellowship awardees. In our 2022 post, we shared childcare data for FY 2021 and part of FY 2022. The data below provides complete childcare support data for FYs 2021 through 2023. Childcare cost support may be requested as part of a new NRSA application, a continuing application, or as an administrative supplement made during the fellowship period. Table 1 provides the total number of NRSA fellows, the number of childcare support awards received by new and continuing fellows, the percentage of fellows receiving this support, and the total value of childcare awards made for FYs 2021 through 2023. Of note: The percentage of fellows that received childcare cost support rose from 5.6% in FY 2021 to 8.4% in FY 2023. The total number of childcare awards rose from 231 in FY 2021 to 331 in FY 2023. The total childcare support awarded rose f...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike childcare cost Family Friendly fellowship NRSA postdocs Source Type: funding