Getting nowhere fast: The lack of gender equity in the physiology community

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released their DataBook for 2013 (National Institutes of Health DataBook, 2013), a laudable effort to increase the transparency of who applies for and is awarded grants. Dr. Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Science, deserves a shout-out for instigating the release of data used to drive decisions of funding and policy. He has continued that effort as president of the American Society of Cell and Molecular Biology. Dr. Sally Rockey, deputy director of Extramural Research at NIH, has transformed communication between NIH and the scientific community with her Rock Talk blog, which explains NIH policies and practices in plain language. These efforts to increase transparency at the NIH allow us to better understand the forces that have so much impact on our current and future work. One section in the new DataBook pertains to data on grant funding analyzed by gender. Women constitute at least half of our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows ; Fig. 1 shows that women receive about half of all individual graduate and postdoctoral fellowships in the F30/F31 and F32 grant mechanisms, respectively. In fact, women have made up about half of these awardees for more than 20 years! If the fraction of female F-grant awardees is a reasonable surrogate for the fraction of female trainees in general, these data suggest that women have had at least 20 years of advancing through the ranks in sufficient numbers so that by now we should see evidence of equity at the assistant, associate, and full professor levels. But that is not the case. The long-standing gender parity among trainees has not led to parity among faculty , as demonstrated by the lack of women who receive R01-equivalent grant awards. Fig. 2 (red symbols) shows the percentage of R01-equivalent grants awarded to women, taken from the NIH DataBook, from 1998 through 2013. The low representation of women could reflect either a small fraction of grant proposals submitted by women or a disproportionally low success rate. Here, the NIH DataBook again has the answer. In the time period reported, the success rates for new R01-equivalent applications were indistinguishable for male and female applicants, so the lack of parity must be the result of fewer women having submitted proposals. Although the success rates for competitive renewal applications were consistently about four percentage points higher for male than for female …