Though national data suggest that women researchers are less likely to obtain government research funding than men, Johns Hopkins scholars have found that male and female researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are funded at nearly the same rate.
Johns Hopkins is America's most heavily government-funded school, with hundreds of millions in grants from the NIH alone. In recent years, universities and the government have been under fire for imbalances in taxpayer funding for women and minorities.
Young scientists and clinicians can get an early-career development grant, or K grant, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are expected to advance eventually and establish independent research careers. The next step toward that academic career is a normal NIH research project grant, known as an R01 grant, where everyone is treated equally.
The authors compared K grant awardees at Johns Hopkins against national trends. A 2009 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that, nationwide, women were 21 percent less likely to receive independent research grants than men. Between 1999 and 2008, 92 faculty members in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins received K grants -- 49 men and 43 women. Of those grantees, 34 would eventually receive R01 grants -- 16 men and 18 women.
"In comparison to national data that report sex differences in attainment of independent funding, we found no sex differences among K award recipients in the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins," says Rita Rastogi Kalyani, M.D., M.H.S., who wrote the paper with Hsin-Chieh Yeh, Ph.D.; Jeanne Clarke, M.D., M.P.H.; Myron Weisfeldt, M.D.; Terry Choi; and Susan McDonald, M.D.
Women represented roughly one-third of the active physician workforce in the United States in 2013. Though that number has increased over time, women remain a minority in academic medicine. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, in 2013-2014, women constituted 38 percent of full-time medical school faculty, but only 21 percent of full professors, 15 percent of department chairs and 16 percent of deans.
Surveys on why that is tell a different story than Johns Hopkins academics do, showing it is not a matter of a lack of diversity but that more female doctors go into medicine to directly help patients, while men who want to do research go into academia.
Published in the Journal of Women's Health