NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF
HEALTH:
Male Sweep of New Award Raises Questions of
Bias
Jeffrey Mervis
Where are the women? That's what some scientists are asking after
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) picked nine men to receive
the inaugural Director's Pioneer Award for innovative research
(Science, 8 October, p. 220).
The 5-year, $500,000-a-year awards are part of NIH's "roadmap"
for increasing the payoff from the agency's $28 billion budget, and
Director Elias Zerhouni has compared the winners to famed U.S.
explorers Merriweather Lewis and William Clark for their willingness
"to explore uncharted territory." Within hours of the 29 September
announcement, however, some researchers had begun to bristle at the
gender imbalance in that first class of biomedical pioneers.
"It sends a message to women researchers that they are not on an
even playing field," wrote Elizabeth Ivey, president of the
Association for Women in Science, in a 1 October letter to Zerhouni.
"I hope that you [will] make an effort to correct such a
perception." The American Society for Cell Biology, in a 15 October
letter to Zerhouni, commended him for creating the prize but
lamented its "demoralizing effect" on the community. Critics noted
that men constituted 94% (60 of 64) of the reviewers tapped to help
winnow down some 1300 applications for the award and seven of the
eight outside scientists on the final review panel, which grilled
applicants for an hour before settling on the winners.
NIH officials estimate that women made up about 20% of the
Pioneer applicants. But only about 13% of the 240 who made it
through the first cut were women, and only two of the 21 finalists.
(In contrast, about 25% of the applicants for NIH's bread-and-butter
R01 awards to individual investigators are women, and their success
rate is within a percentage point of that of their male
counterparts.) "With any elite award, there are so many deserving
candidates that it's easy to choose only men," says Stanford
University neuroscientist Ben Barres, who says he was "outraged" by
the gender imbalance. "I actually think it's more a matter of
neglect than of sexism."
 Men at work. Nine men won the
first NIH Director's Pioneer Awards, chosen by panels that
included few women.
SOURCE:
NIH |
The gender of
the final applicants did not come up during the discussion, says
review panel member Judith Swain, professor of medicine at Stanford.
Swain, who called the exercise "the most interesting review panel
I've ever been involved in," says she saw no evidence of "active
discrimination." But she concurs that the demographics of the
reviewers and the winners lead to "a disturbing observation."
NIH officials are struggling to find the best way to respond to
the charges of gender insensitivity. Stephen Straus, head of the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and team
leader for the NIH-wide competition, told Science on the
day of the awards that "we gave the gender issue a great deal of
thought, but none of the women finalists came close to making the
pay line." A week later, in the first of a series of e-mail
exchanges with Barres, Straus remarked that the absence of women was
"noted with some surprise" by senior NIH officials and that "we know
we can do better" in subsequent rounds. In a later exchange,
however, Straus wrote, "I don't believe that NIH can credibly
discard its two-level peer review system when nine grants out of the
many thousands awarded this year turn out differently than some
might wish."
NIH is evaluating how it ran the Pioneer program--including how
the award was publicized and the demographics of the
applicants--before launching the next competition in January. A
thorough review is essential, says Arthur Kleinman, a medical
anthropologist at Harvard University and chair of the final review
panel, who believes NIH needs to do more to reach several
groups--minorities and social and behavioral scientists as well as
women--not represented in the first batch of winners. "I agree that
they need to be more sensitive to diversity," he says. "But at the
same time, I think Zerhouni deserves a lot of credit for even trying
something like this."
