A researcher's most important grant is often the first one. These grants provide the money for critical equipment and pay for technicians, graduate students, and post-graduate researchers—the key ingredients to successful labs. Because of all it enables, getting that first grant is an essential step toward launching a research career. As a result, problems in our system that bias who gets these grants may have an outsized influence on the trajectory of research.

But that's exactly what a new study in JAMA seems to have found. While first-time grants in the biosciences are given to men and women at roughly even numbers, the male grant recipients tend to get more money from the same number of grants. While the situation definitely appears to be problematic, there are some subtleties in the data that suggest the situation is complex and that this isn't an across-the-board problem. The disparities are still large enough that they could be contributing to disparities in the research community.

Start me up

When a university or research center hires a new faculty member, it promises them little more than a bit of unoccupied lab space and some money. Every bit of research the new faculty wants to do requires equipment and consumables like chemicals and enzymes. And since they'll be busy writing grants and teaching, they need to hire some people to actually start doing the research. The money provided by the university helps greatly in this regard, but it tends to run out quickly if there's any expensive equipment involved.

Bringing in grant money is thus essential to making the transition to a stable, functioning lab, so obtaining a major grant is critical. It also lends a certain validation to the researcher, which helps promote further career advancement. Failure to get this funding tends to result in a lab shutdown and an alternate career outside of academic research.

With this early funding being so critical, we'd like to make it as fair as possible so that people with the best skills and scientific ideas manage to clear the hurdle into a stable career. Unfortunately, there's some indication that one of the major sources of funding—the startup money provided by the host institution—may have some issues with gender inequality. A small study of biomedical researchers in the Northeast found that men tended to get more startup money than women.

The new study provides a more comprehensive look at the other half of the equation: grant funding of biomedical research, which is primarily provided by the National Institutes of Health.

Show me the money

The NIH makes the results of its grant funding public, allowing the researchers (all from Northwestern University) to identify nearly 54,000 grants in which a researcher received their first NIH funding between 2006 and 2017. An automated system was used to assign the gender of the individual based on their name, and the resulting data was analyzed in various ways.

From a distance, everything looks pretty positive. Forty-four percent of the first-time grant earners were women, which is higher than their rate of enrollment in MD-PhD programs. Research performance was also nicely balanced, with no significant differences between the genders in the rates they published papers or the frequency with which those papers were cited.

But things don't look so good when you examine how much money came with those grants. The median size of the first grant given to a male was $166,000; for a woman, the equivalent figure was $127,000. That's a difference of roughly $40,000. Looking at specific groups of universities highlighted some large discrepancies. In Big 10 schools (a category which, amusingly, contains 14 major research universities), the median first-time grant given to women was worth $66,000; for men it was $148,000. For the Ivy League colleges, the gap was $20,000.

It's hard to argue that this is good. But if you look at the details, there are some indications that the situation is not as awful as it might seem. If you limit the analysis to the ten programs at the NIH with the most money to give away, the gap between the genders narrows from $40,000 down to $10,000. And if you look at the grant that carries the most prestige and is generally used to support the running of a single lab (called an R01), the median female first-time grantee actually receives $16,000 more than the male equivalent.

If you look at what's driving the gender disparity, it tends to come from specific types of funding. One example is what are typically called contracts, where, rather than asking scientists to submit their best ideas for evaluation, the NIH looks for people who can complete a specific task that it wants done. Another source is grants given out for the set up of facilities that provide a department- or university-wide resource for other scientists, like providing DNA synthesis or mass spectrometry.

Given that, it's not clear that the large gender disparity seen here is actually getting in the way of people establishing stable labs. RO1s, where women do well, used to be the main mechanisms by which researchers established that stability; in recent years, only about one in every 10 RO1s gets funded. Given the high rate of failure there, it may be that these other forms of funding have taken on larger importance for providing stability, meaning the gender disparity could have a large influence on the composition of the research community.

So while this research has identified a potential issue, it may well not be the issue that problems with first-time funding would have obviously suggested. Like most good research, the study raises additional questions: how is the money in the areas with large gender disparities being used, and what's going on in those areas to create these disparities in the first place?

JAMA, 2019. DOI: 10.1001/jama.2018.21944 (About DOIs).