New York Times headline: Black Scientists Less Likely to Win Federal Research Grants, Study
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0273
The 19 August issue of Science carries a report called “Race, Ethnicity, and NIH Research Awards .” Page A16 of that same day’s New York Times carries a Kenneth Chang article about the report, but with the substantially more newspaperlike headline “Black Scientists Less Likely to Win Federal Research Grants, Study Reports .”
Here’s the abstract from Science:
We investigated the association between a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) applicant’s self-identified race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award by using data from the NIH IMPAC II grant database, the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and other sources. Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally likely to be funded regardless of race, we find that Asians are 4 percentage points and black or African-American applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we find that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding. Our results suggest some leverage points for policy intervention.
Chang quotes Francis S. Collins, NIH’s director, declaring that the “situation is not acceptable” and that this “is not one of those reports that we will look at and then put aside.” Chang adds that the “researchers said they did not know whether the panels that reviewed the grant applications were discriminating against black applicants, whether applications from black researchers were somehow weaker, or whether a combination of factors was at play.”
Later, Chang quotes Otis W. Brawley, the chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society: “It’s not that they’re out to deny blacks funding.” Chang notes that Brawley is black, and reports that he doesn’t believe that “overt racism” is involved. The Times article continues:
Rather, it is more likely an unconscious bias, he said, with the reviewers more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to someone they are familiar with, and with black researchers tending to keep a low profile in the scientific world.
Dr. Collins agreed. “Even today, in 2011, in our society, there is still an unconscious, insidious form of bias that subtly influences people’s opinions,” he said. “I think that may be very disturbing for people in the scientific community to contemplate, but I think we have to take that as one of the possibilities and investigate it and see if that is in fact still happening.”
Chang also reports that a study task force has been formed and that NIH has resolved to “recruit more young researchers to serve on the review committees,” possibly giving them “a better understanding of how to write a successful application for their own research.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.