23 Years of Inequity
For decades, the National Science Foundation has funded research proposals by white scientists at higher rates than those from scientists in other racial groups, and the discrepancy is increasing, according to a recent preprint paper.
The paper’s authors analyzed public NSF data on the race and ethnicity of the principal investigators listed on research proposals between 1996 and 2019. Projects by white principal investigators, they found, have been funded above the overall funding rate — the proportion of proposals that were awarded — while proposals by most researchers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color were funded below the overall funding rate. The relative funding rate for proposals pitched by white principal investigators increased over that 23-year period.
Christine Yifeng Chen, a geologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and co-founder of the affinity group Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Geosciences, said that she and her co-authors decided to examine who gets NSF funding after a professor in her affinity group mentioned that scientists of Asian ancestry have a harder time getting funding than do their white peers. That ran counter to what she had previously heard — that white scientists now have trouble getting funding, she said.
When Chen and her co-authors shared their data with tenured faculty members, some told them that the findings aligned with their experiences, she said. Other scientists said they were relieved to know that they weren’t alone in their struggles to get funding.
Rosie ‘Anolani Alegado, an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and one of the paper’s authors, said that she was surprised at how consistent and dramatic the findings were. The trend, however, wasn’t shocking, she said.
During the time period that was studied, colleges and other institutions have tried to diversify the science community, but the disparities have gotten worse, Alegado said.
The research is a warning against conflating demographic diversity with systemic infrastructure change, Alegado said. There is hope that up-and-coming scientists from underrepresented groups will one day be in leadership positions and able to make changes within the system itself; otherwise, those scientists will be stuck fighting the system.
Far-Reaching Consequences
Disparities in funding affect science, research, and the changes that might result from that research. Cesunica Ivey, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, said that it could be dangerous to not incorporate diverse perspectives when aiming to present science-based solutions.
Lived experiences differ among racial groups. If scientists of color aren’t getting funded at adequate rates, then marginalized communities may not have their needs fully investigated or understood. This could lead scientists to potentially propose false solutions for these communities’ problems, she said.
The problem is clear in the medical-science community, where male dominance has created a bias toward medical knowledge that’s focused on men, Chen said. Heart-disease research, for example, identified the symptoms most common in men, and many women experience delayed diagnosis or misdiagnosis because their symptoms tend to be different.
NSF grants also play a role in promotion and advancement, said Bala Chaudhary, an associate professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. When they’re up for promotion and tenure, scholars are evaluated in part based on the grant funding they’ve generated.
Chaudhary says she’s grown more lonesome as she’s advanced in her career. In part, it’s because she’s noticed fewer people of color who are tenured faculty members compared with the number of graduate students of color. It’s not clear, though, that the differences in NSF funding are directly correlated with the lack of tenured faculty members from marginalized backgrounds.
Beyond drawing attention to the funding disparities, Chen and her co-authors are calling for the NSF to release more data so scholars can answer more questions about who gets funding. The paper states that the research is limited to the data made available by the NSF’s annual merit-review reports. Information on funding by other categories — like gender, institution type, and career type — are calculated separately from the principal investigator’s race and ethnicity.
In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the organization is working to ease challenges that people face when applying for grants. The statement also said that the NSF has improved the quality of its data collection.
“For more than two decades, NSF has been engaged in a concerted effort to not only address underlying disparities, but to also continuously improve the data that reveal them, including efforts to address a recent increase in nonreporting of demographic data.”
When Chen was a student she heard some professors say that diversity, equity, and inclusion work could conflict with meritocracy, but that tension can be misguided, she said. Understanding whose work is prioritized and funded ultimately affects who can be a scientist.
Updates and Corrections
A few weeks ago, we shared a newsletter about the dearth of Native Hawaiian students at the University of Hawai’i’s flagship campus. Since then, we learned that there were errors in our data and that we missed some critical information. We’ve updated the web version of that newsletter with accurate data and a more complete picture of the challenges Native Hawaiian students face in the state’s higher-education system. You can find the updated and corrected newsletter here.
