Not only who but what: NIH funding disparity between black and white scientists partly driven by research topic
Ever since a landmark 2011 study supported the long-held notion that African American scientists were significantly less likely than white researchers to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, researchers have sought to better understand what’s behind the gap.
A new paper builds on that previous work to find that research topic choice is partially driving the disparity, accounting for 20% of the funding gulf. Looking at data from nearly 160,000 funding applications from 2011-2015, researchers found that topics dealing with cellular and molecular science were more likely to be funded by the NIH — and black scientists were less likely to be studying these topics. They tended instead to focus on clinical research that looked at population- and community-level interventions.
