Funding Longevity by Gender among NIH-Supported Investigators

For nearly 10 years, more women than men received PhDs in the biomedical sciences, yet women are still underrepresented at every subsequent stage of academic advancement.  In 2015, for example, women earned 53% of PhDs, but they comprised only 48% of post-doctoral fellows, 44% of assistant professors, and 35% of professors. To better understand what might be contributing to women’s underrepresentation in later stages of academia, Dr. Lisa Hechtman and her colleagues at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) analyzed “funding longevity by gender” among funded NIH investigators.  Their analysis, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, yielded a number of interesting findings which I’d like to share with you. Our NIGMS colleagues  started with 34,770 unique investigators who received their first major NIH research project grant  (RPG) between 1991 and 2010.  These supported investigators were followed over time to see how long they remained funded; if an investigator did not receive funding for 3 years in a row, they were considered to have dropped out of the funding pool. The first key finding is that of the 34,770 unique investigators, only 10,660 of them (or 31%) were women.  Even among the 9,969 investigators who first received funding between 2006 and 2010, only 3,342 (34%) were women. Figure 1 Panel A shows a Kaplan-Meier survival plot of funding longevity by gender.  Women had slightly less funding long...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike Biomedical Workforce Funding data Source Type: funding