Despite recent gains, women receive far fewer NIH grants for hematology research
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Key takeaways:
- Men received approximately two-thirds of all NIH grants for hematology research over a 10-year period.
- A significant increase in grants awarded to women occurred during the study period.
Women received significantly fewer academic research grants compared with men in hematology, although some agencies have shown progress in closing the gender disparity, according to results presented at ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition.
Despite a significant increase in the number of research project grants awarded to women over a 10-year period, researchers reported that men received more than two-thirds of grants for non-malignant hematology research in 2022.
“We do need to make targeted efforts to bridge this gap,” Sara Khan, DO, an internal medicine resident at Bayonet Point Hospital, said in a press briefing.
Hematology has historically been a male-centered field, and research grants have been predominantly distributed toward that gender.
Khan and colleagues conducted a 10-year analysis for the fiscal years 2012-2022 to determine the number of research project grants awarded to men and women by the NIH.
Researchers collected information using NIH RePORTER tool, Tidyverse, and janitor packages in R. The data included parameters such as grant ID, agency code, activity code, abstract text, project title, fiscal year, activity status, award amount, organization and the principal investigator’s name.
Researchers processed investigators’ names using the gender package in R to determine whether they were male or female.
Proportional analyses compared female grant recipients from 2012-2022, as well as the breakdown for each NIH agency. Researchers conducted additional statistical tests to determine whether any substantial changes in grants received for either gender occurred.
Women received 32.9% of the 250,031 research project grants handed out by the NIH during the 10-year period (n = 82,152; 95% CI, 0.41-0.43). Men received more than double the number of grants, with a total of 167,879 (95% CI, 0.5-0.55), or 67.1% of all grants awarded by the NIH during the study period.
However, grants awarded to women increased significantly from the first year of the study to the last (6,865 to 9,339; P < .001), whereas men saw little change (16,221 to 15,601).
Only the National Institute of Minority Health and Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) gave more grants to women than men in 2012 (NIMHD, 52%; NINR, 74%). National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) joined them by awarding most grants to women as of 2022.
Conversely, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), and National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) gave out less than 25% of grants to women in 2012. The NIBIB had the widest gender disparity in 2022, awarding only 23% of its grants to women.
“Now that we know that there’s a problem, the next step is to find out why there’s a problem and where does it all start,” Khan said. “This was analyzing R01 grants, so these types of grants usually go to independent researchers, so we want to kind of go backwards in the academic pipeline and see where we are first starting to notice these disparities so that we can create our efforts and changes and direct [them] towards that area.”
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Khan S, et al. Abstract 5113. Presented at: ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition; Dec. 9-12, 2023; San Diego.
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