NSF grant decisions reflect systemic racism, study argues

An independent analysis shows that white scientists are more likely to win a grant from the National Science Foundation than researchers from other racial and ethnic groups.

The analysis shows that there are similar racial differences in the funding of scientists by other agencies. The authors say that the gap in funding rates is due to systemic racism and that white scientists at the top and Asian researchers at the bottom are to blame.

Their study was posted earlier this month on the Center for Open Science preprint site.

A copy of the analysis was given to the leadership of the organization. The director of the National Science Foundation shared concerns about systemic racial disparity in funding.

The data on 1 million proposals was contained in the annual reports. Chen and her team focused on the racial disparity after hearing complaints from senior nonwhite colleagues about the fairness of the grant process.

The project was started by early-career scientists. The status quo is allowed in academia by the prevailing culture. Nobody would do the analysis if we didn't do it.

Over the course of the study, the overall success rate varied between 22% and 34%. White scientists did better than others. When applying for a grant, scientists are asked to give their race and ethnic background.

31.3% of white scientists' proposals were funded by the National Science Foundation in 2019. The success rate for Asian scientists was more than double that of Black scientists. 29% of the time, Latino scientists' proposals were funded, slightly above average, but below the rate for white scientists.

Higher success rates are translated into "surplus awards." The team calculated that white scientists received over 800 surplus grants. Over the course of two decades, the surplus was over 12,000 awards.

Asian scientists received less awards than they would have gotten had their success rate been the same. Half the number of white scientists send in proposals is submitted by Asian scientists. In 1999, the relative advantage for white scientists was 3 percentage points above the agency's average success rate.

The funding gap for black scientists was still significant despite the smaller one. Black researchers submit a proposal for every proposal that white scientists give them. According to the preprint, the funding rate for black scientists was 8 percentage points lower than that of white scientists. The success rate for Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians was 11 percentage points lower than that of white scientists. Latino scientists have done slightly better than the norm but are still below the success rate for white scientists.

The majority of the proposals received by the National Science Foundation are research proposals. Equipment and facilities, conferences, and other activities are all supported by the remaining requests. The study found that white scientists won more research awards than any other group. Most non white groups did better than the average.

A team led by the University of Kansas, Lawrence, found that the success rates of black and white scientists were very different. There were follow-up studies that accounted for such factors as an applicants publication history, age, academic rank, and how much research takes place at their institution.

Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institute of Health, apologized to individuals in the biomedical research enterprise who have suffered disadvantages due to structural racism. The goal of the programs is to increase the success of black applicants.

It was not possible for Chen's team to do a multivariate analysis without access to the data. The co-author of the paper says that the information would have been very useful. We could have looked at the impact of the existing programs of the National Science Foundation.

Susan White is the director of the statistical research center at the American Institute of physics. She believes that the disparity is real and serious.

Although the agency is proud of its array of programs, there is still much work to be done.

A casual remark at one of the first meetings of a group formed in 2020 to provide a forum for Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the geosciences led to the new analysis.

Asian Americans have a hard time getting funding from the National Science Foundation, according to a senior scientist. Chen wondered if there was any evidence to support the claim. Conventional wisdom was that things were getting harder for white scientists.

The senior scientist gave her a link to the data on the merit review system. After checking out 25 years of annual reports, Chen and Sara discovered that funding success rates for Asians and other minorities were lower than for whites. The gap had been growing over time.

The discovery angered Chen, a vocal advocate for greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in science. They were worried that colleagues would ignore a paper by two early-career scientists who had never received a grant. They wanted to get academics with such credentials for their project.

One of them was Vernon Morris. Morris founded the first graduate program in atmospheric sciences at a historically Black college when he was a professor at Howard University. He is a member of the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering of the National Science Foundation.

The committee had never done the analysis at the same level of detail. The details of the project can be used to get people to act.

Morris cautions that just analyzing the publicly available data isn't enough to close the gap. The opportunity to dig deeper is provided by the dataNSF has that we don't have. There is a structural problem with the community of volunteer reviewers who are mostly white.

He and the other co- authors hope that NSF will address both issues. The next step is to come up with a solution. We are not there at this time.