Leveling the Playing Field: Initiatives to Address Gender and Racial Inequities in NIH Funding

Abstract

Since 1990, the number of NIH-funded training grants awarded to women at the pre- and post-doctoral levels have been steadily increasing, with women comprising 60-61% of predocs, and 55-56% of postdoctoral fellows. Similarly, women constitute the majority of career development (K) awardees (58%). Nevertheless, the proportion of R01-equivalent awards obtained by women was only 35% of all awarded R01’s in 2022, although an improvement over the 22% rate in 1998. As for research grants by race, nearly 71% were awarded to Whites as of November 2022.Aware of these disparities, the NIH as a whole and the Office of Research on Women’s Health in particular have issued a number of funding opportunity announcements that seek to mitigate some of the barriers that prevent women and other underrepresented groups from obtaining more equitable representation in the NIH-funded biomedical workforce. Many of these available funding opportunities, which are intended to increase the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce, are often overlooked or are unknown to the underrepresented sectors of the biomedical workforce. This presentation is intended to increase awareness of some of these mechanisms and create a greater impact on promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility to disadvantaged groups. Public This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.