About a month ago, I wrote two posts (here and here) about a paper calling attention to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) disparity in funding black versus white investigators (this disparity is real), and the accusations that this is due to structural racism at the NIH (false). There are several sets of data showing that the funding disparity is due to other factors, like choice of research field, as well as suggesting that there is no racism involved in assessing NIH proposals.

And yet now the NIH is saying that the organization, and biomedical research in general, are ridden with “structural racism”, and working to omit racism for which there’s no evidence (indeed, there’s evidence against it).

I’ll briefly reiterate the lines of evidence for lack of racial bias in NIH funding disparities.

a.) An extensive 2019 study in which blinded referees were asked to review genuine NIH proposals with black, white, and female authors, found no evidence of racial or gender bias. Here’s a summary from the study’s authors:

We find little to no race or gender bias in initial R01 evaluations, and additionally find that any bias that might have been present must be negligible in size. This conclusion was robust to a wide array of statistical model specifications. Pragmatically, important bias may be present in other aspects of the granting process, but our evidence suggests that it is not present in the initial round of R01 reviews.

R01s are primary research grants: the most important source of funding for individual investigators. Curiously, nobody seems to pay attention to this study, and I suspect it’s because it doesn’t support the dominant narrative of racial bias.

b.) Another paper in Science Advances showed that the funding disparity was due to two factors. First, black investigators tended to submit proposals for kinds of research, and to research areas, that historically have not had funding rates as high as those of fields involving more “pure research”. That is, the disparity was due in part to choice of research area, not to race. An even large amount of the disparity in funding was the “track record” of investigators: previous research and success in doing well with funded grants. As I wrote:

An earlier study that I haven’t yet seen shows that “track record” (i.e., accomplishments as recorded on the NIH c.v., which includes papers published that resulted from previous grants or other funding) to have an even larger effect on rate of funding. That shows that the track record of black scientists is rated lower than white scientists in funding, but, as we saw above, racism itself, as opposed to this index of previous accomplishment, wasn’t found to contribute to funding scores. Track record is not a funding problem, but a “pipeline” problem whose solution is complex.

This again, seems to not involve racial bias, because these track records are part of NIH proposals, whose evaluation, as noted in a), show no evidence for racial bias.

If then, you want to attain equal rates of funding of black versus white investigators (“equity”), you must either shift the priorities for different areas to get funding, or work on ways to improve the track record of black scientists applying for grants. The latter difference may ultimately devolve to historical racism which creates the “pipeline” problem, but what’s clear is that accusations of racism during the NIH evaluation process itself are unfounded.

Click on the screenshot to read the Science piece, including the director’s apology for “structural racism” for which there’s no evidence:

NIH director Francis Collins, who’s done a good job at the helm, nevertheless had to take one for team diversity and say that there’s structural racism at the NIH. All indented sections are from the article, and I’ll respond briefly.

Collins’s apology is certainly responding to an earlier letter in Cell that basically called the NIH racist in its funding decisions. The indented quotes, though, are from the article above:

Responding to concerns about discrimination against Black people, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins today issued an unusual public apology for what he called “structural racism in biomedical research” and pledged to address it with a sweeping set of actions.

NIH’s long-running efforts to improve diversity “have not been sufficient,” Collins wrote in the statement. “To those individuals in the biomedical research enterprise who have endured disadvantages due to structural racism, I am truly sorry.” The agency plans “new ways to support diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and will also correct policies within the agency “that may harm our workforce and our science,” he added.

As I said, there’s no published evidence for racism at the NIH, and funding disparities are due to other factors. And note that Collins is indicting the NIH, not just “biomedical research” (I can’t speak to racism in the latter, but we’re talking about the NIH, which was the subject of the Cell letter).

What he’s asking for here is equity, that is, equal funding of black and white investigators, not just equal opportunity, which involves proposals judged by merit alone, and without racism. In other words, there is to be a quota of some sorts, attained by either by switching around the NIH’s funding priorities by overemphasizing applied research and downgrading pure research (a major change), or somehow prioritizing black scientists over white ones, which is illegal (see below).

More. I’m not sure whether Native Americans can be considered to be less important than blacks in getting funding given the history of genocide of America’s indigenous people, but I’m not touching that:

Although some observers welcomed NIH’s plans, first described Friday at a meeting of Collins’s Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD), critics fault the agency for not more directly addressing funding disparities between Black and white scientists.

NIH’s move is, in part, a response to last year’s incidents of police brutality as well as the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Black people. An ACD working group on diversity released a report on Friday that calls for NIH to “acknowledge the prevalence of racism and anti-Blackness in the scientific workforce.” The group focused specifically on Black people and not groups such as Native Americans because of the country’s 300-year legacy of slavery and segregation, says co-chair Roy Wilson, president of Wayne State University.

Here are the data on disparities in funding:

NIH has also faced long-standing concerns about racial bias in its funding patterns. A 2011 study known as the Ginther report found Black researchers’ funding rates are 10 percentage points lower than those of white researchers. The latest data show improvement: From 2003 to 2020, the number of basic R01 grants to Black investigators has risen from 52 to 166, and their success rate has doubled to 24%, compared with 31% for white investigators. Still, that is only “incremental improvement,” says Marie Bernard, NIH acting chief officer for scientific workforce diversity.

A doubling of success rate in 17 years seems pretty good to me, and the gap has lowered to only 7%. But that this is characterized as “only incremental improvement” seems weird to me: of course improvement will be incremental, and it will be especially slow if it depends on improvements in science education and opportunities for minorities that start at a young age.

The article notes that the NIH is already committing itself to spending $60 on funding research on “health disparities and health equity”, and is appointing diversity officers at every one of its 27 institutes and centers, as well as improving “outreach about NIH’s diversity training programs”.

But that is not enough, for people are demanding immediate equity in funding:

But many of the planned steps were presented “in a passive, noncommittal way,” Eniola-Adefeso says [she is the senior author on the Cell critique of the NIH]. And her group was disappointed that NIH has not agreed to fund Black scientists seeking R01s at the same rate as white scientists. Some observers have argued NIH could narrow the gap by funding Black scientists whose proposals fall just outside the peer-review score that is the cutoff for funding; the agency already does this for grants that meet an institute’s programmatic goals.

They are demanding funding equity, but that’s hard to do for three reasons. As I noted above, part of the gap is due to different choices between black and white scientists in what areas they apply for, with black scientists applying in areas that are less liable to be funded for everyone. Second, there is the differential track record, and omitting that means ditching an important meritocratic way to evaluate grants: how well the scientist has done. But, as we know, meritocracy is being downgraded in many places, probably for this reason.

Finally, to rate or rank grants using race as a criterion, especially in a government-run institution, is simply illegal.

“That is the immediate action that is needed,” Eniola-Adefeso says. “We cannot wait for more studies. We will lose [investigators] from the pipeline which then propagates this vicious cycle.” NIH’s diversity working group noted that Supreme Court decisions make it difficult for the agency to make funding decisions based on race or ethnicity.

The courts have ruled, in principle, that it’s discriminatory to use race-based funding, at least not in a government system. As I said, there are ways to decrease the funding gap, though they may not be palatable to the NIH itself, which may be why they can make only “incremental” improvements. Other ways mean improving education and opportunity for minorities starting at birth, but talk about incremental change: that will be extremely incremental! But, as I say repeatedly, it’s the only way to effect truly equal opportunity.

But one thing is clear, there is not a scintilla of evidence that the funding disparity at the NIH is due to racism. Collins has nothing to apologize for about the NIH. Why he chooses to perpetuate the narrative of structural racism in his organization, in light of the evidence for no racism (and no evidence for racism itself) is something I’ll leave to others.

It’s unusual for a science journal to publish a paper indicting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for racism, but these are unusual times. The journal happens to be the very prestigious organ Cell, in which nineteen women scientists (I believe they’re all women of color) have indicted the NIH for funding black scientists at only 55% the rate of white ones. Further, they explicitly attribute this disparity to racism against blacks. (Asians aren’t mentioned, so I’m not sure whether they were excluded from the data or lumped in with whites.)

The paper, however, is misguided in several important ways. First, as I mentioned, it blames the funding disparity—which has persisted  for over a decade—on racism, despite the fact that there are several other explanations, two of which have been supported by data.  Second, while the authors cite data that, they say, shows racial bias against scientists, they omit the most relevant data for their contention, which shows no bias against NIH funding of black or female investigators in an extensive trial. They also fail to cite data showing that a lot of the funding disparity is based on racial differences in the kinds of problems investigated, and problems which have different funding rates for investigators of all races. Third, the group (henceforth, “Stevens et al.”) recommends a number of fixes of the system that seem to me manifestly unfair, even as forms of affirmative action. In fact, some of them may be illegal given that the NIH is a governmental organization.

The automatic ascribing of inequity (differential representation) to racism when there are other hypothesis is what I discussed yesterday as the “Diversity/Bias” fallacy, though I’ve since learned that people have given it another name. I claim no priority: it’s an obvious fallacy, especially to a scientist used to sussing out all possible explanations.

As I’ve said, I believe in the value of affirmative action in soliciting graduate students and hiring professors, as well as in other areas of social advancement. But I’ve also stated that this kind of preferential treatment in academics, which I see as valuable for several reasons, should stop at the time someone is hired as a faculty member. At that point, since the hired person has been deemed qualified for the faculty/research position, the affirmative action should cease and the candidate should compete for grants, promotions, and honors on an equal basis with everyone else. On this basis I would thus object to the methods suggested by this consortium to boost the scores and funding for black scientists. (See part 2 of this post for those methods.) Stevens et al. also neglect other disadvantaged groups like Hispanics—perhaps because data on funding disparities don’t exist.

You can see the paper (it’s really a scientific “op-ed”) by clicking on the screenshot below, and you can find the pdf here . The full reference is at the bottom.

Here are the authors’ statements (indented) that indict the NIH and modern science for systemic racism.

We are at a historic moment in time: a mainstream awakening to the pain that stems from racial injustice, with our scientific communities openly acknowledging that our practices promote racial inequity and disparity (Barber et al., 2020; Cell Editorial Team, 2020).

The evidence adduced above consists of the preponderance of white patients in clinical investigations and medical databases (which could reflect bias and racism), and some claims of grant disparity due to “systemic racism,” which, upon investigating those references, don’t show systemic racism or even any bias against blacks.  More assertions:

The first study documenting racial disparity in NIH funding hit the field like a shockwave in 2011 (Ginther et al., 2011). This study showed that award probability for Black principal investigators (PIs) in 2000–2006 was ∼55% that of white PIs of similar academic achievement (Ginther et al., 2011). NIH scrambled to study potential reasons for this injustice (Barber et al., 2020; Erosheva et al., 2020).

Note that they characterize this as an “injustice”, which implicitly means racism, unless the disparity itself is seen as “unjust”. (If you believe in true “equity” with success rates of groups in the same proportion as those groups occur in the general proportion, and disparity of outcome might be considered “unjust”.)

Here’s an explicit mention of the field’s racism:

The NIH director and leadership must recognize that its previous approaches, most of which have focused on filling the “pipeline” without simultaneously addressing our profession’s systemic racism, have failed. NIH must change course.

Direct indictment of racism in the NIH funding system:

We ask: if racism is present in academia, how can it not be present in NIH grant review and research, which are performed by academics?

. . . . For example, the NIH should study the cultural competency and unconscious bias harbored by its reviewers, differential review practices and funding disparity between NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and why “matching criteria” (Erosheva et al., 2020) affecting the funding disparity gap.

. . . Silence is complicity. The continued persistence of a racial funding disparity suggests that the scientific workforce, including the NIH leadership, does not understand nor is adequately equipped to recognize and respond to this racism.

There’s this, including some self-indictment:

Faculty colleagues, we respectfully suggest that it is time for us to acknowledge that we—yes each of us, including many of the authors here—have unintentionally contributed to racial inequity in our profession. As just one example of the insidious nature of systemic racism, many studies have shown that we judge CVs and resumes differently based on the name of the applicant alone with both racial and gender bias, even if these CVs are otherwise identical (Eaton et al., 2020, Henry et al., 2017).

And I find this particularly invidious: the authors demand, in their list of anti-racist changes in NIH funding procedure, to score grants higher if the proposal contains diverse (i.e., black) investigators:

We ask: why is “diversity of the investigator team” not a scorable criterion in NIH grant review and priority for funding?

Be careful with responding, because one answer is racist and the other is not.

Seriously? This is a debatable issue, and one answer does not automatically make one “racist.”

I’ll talk about the c.v. data in a second, and will claim that it’s largely irrelevant to the entire funding procedure of the NIH.

The paper has one figure arguing that antiracist reviewers are needed to eliminate the funding and career disparity between black and white scientists—implying that racist reviewers expressing “group think” account for that disparity.

Note above that the cited evidence for racism in judging grants rests on two papers showing differences when scientists judge c.v.s of black and white investigators. I could access only one of these, the Eaton et al. paper, which does show disparities between sexes and races in hireability, likeability, and judgements of competence when made-up c.v.s of potential postdocs were assessed. (Note that these aren’t grant applicants or potential faculty members being assessed, but postdoctoral candidates.)

The result: Men were judged significantly more competent and hireable, as postdocs while women were judged more likable. For race, “White and Asian candidates were rated as more competent and hireable than Black and Latinx candidates across departments. Likeability ratings were not found to differ significantly by applicant race.”

So this does show apparent sexism and racism in assessing c.v.s of graduate students that are made up. However, another survey of faculty and student hiring preferences show that minority candidates and women are preferred above white candidates and males, especially by faculty. (This is for hiring faculty members, not postdocs.) That study was done not using fake c.v.s but assessing attitudes, and if you were wedded to the hypothesis of racism, one could say that the respondents were simply distorting their own views.

However, all of these disparate results become irrelevant when you look at an important study that, surprisingly, was not even cited by Stevens et al. themselves. It shows, through the use of reviewers assessing (as an exercise) actual NIH proposals whose authors were randomly identified as black, white, male, or female (names were switched around), that there was neither gender nor racial bias in scoring proposals. Since c.v.s are part of NIH proposals, these assessments would include weighing the candidates’ c.v.s and research productivity. Most important, this is an actual study, done in large numbers, of how grant proposals are adjudicated by the NIH (the authors used reviewers who had previously reviewed for the NIH).  The study was published in 2019, so the authors of the Cell piece above certainly knew of it. They just omitted it.

Click on the screenshot to read.

I don’t want to go into detail here, but the researchers used genuine NIH proposals that were either funded or unfunded (24 of each), and sent three proposals to each of 412 scientists who had reviewed NIH grants before. The names were changed to reflect names associated with gender or race, and precautions were taken to prevent the reviewers from checking whether the applicants actually existed. You can read this for yourself, but here’s the conclusion from the abstract:

We find little to no race or gender bias in initial R01 evaluations, and additionally find that any bias that might have been present must be negligible in size. This conclusion was robust to a wide array of statistical model specifications. Pragmatically, important bias may be present in other aspects of the granting process, but our evidence suggests that it is not present in the initial round of R01 reviews.

It’s puzzling that this result isn’t mentioned by Stevens et al., since it’s the most important study bearing on the possibility of bias in NIH reviewing.

So if there’s no bias in reviewing, why do black investigators get NIH funding only 55% as often as do white investigators? One possibility, which is supported by another study, is that black investigators choose areas of application that generally have lower funding rates. And, indeed, the paper below supports that (click on screenshot; see a shorter summary here):

Here’s a summary from the abstract:

Notably, AA/B [African-American/Black] applicants tend to propose research on topics with lower award rates. These topics include research at the community and population level, as opposed to more fundamental and mechanistic investigations; the latter tend to have higher award rates. Topic choice alone accounts for over 20% of the funding gap after controlling for multiple variables, including the applicant’s prior achievements.

In other words, black investigators tend to propose “applied” studies, including those involving community intervention, health disparities, fertility, adolescent health, and so on, that are directed more towards solving social problems than other proposals involving “pure” research, and these studies are funded at lower rates—regardless of the investigator’s ethnicity or sex—than are “pure research” studies.   

Of course, one could argue that this involves bias of a sort as well—bias against applied research. One could also argue that this kind of work is seen as less important because it’s considered an area of interest to minorities.

Now this factor accounts for only 20% of the disparity in funding between black and white scientists. An earlier study that I haven’t yet seen shows that “rack record” (i.e., accomplishments as recorded on the NIH c.v., which includes papers published that resulted from previous grants or other funding) to have an even larger effect on rate of funding. That shows that the track record of black scientists is rated lower than white scientists in funding, but, as we saw above, racism itself, as opposed to this index of previous accomplishment, wasn’t found to contribute to funding scores. Track record is not a funding problem, but a “pipeline” problem whose solution is complex. But, as I’ve suggested, widening the pipeline—assuring equality of opportunity for all at the outset of life—is the best and most permanent way of treating people fairly.

The study above suggests at least one route for reducing the funding disparity: upgrade the importance of “applied” research involving community intervention, public health, and so on. Because those fields disproportionately attract black investigators, you could fund more minority scientists simply by diverting more money to these areas. In this way you increase equity without any form of affirmative action. (Of course, upgrading areas that tend to attract minority investigators could be seen as a form of affirmative action.)

I see this post is getting too long, so I’ll break it into two sections. In this one we’ve seen that the claim of systemic racism is not a data-supported explanation for the lower funding rate of black investigators. What the data show for funding is that race or sex don’t seem to be important, but that track record and choice of research area do. To create more equity in funding then, one has to consider interventions that would improve the track record of black scientists (this is a complex problem that begins well before grants are submitted) or give more money to areas of applied research.

However, the Cell paper of Stevens et al. suggest affirmative-action interventions instead: when evaluating grants, we should give black investigators higher scores, special interventions, and different treatment. In the next and final bit of this analysis, I’ll discuss these recommendations.

h/t: Luana
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Stevens, K. R., K. S. Masters, P. I. Imoukhuede, K. A. Haynes, L. A. Setton, E. Cosgriff-Hernandez, M. A. Lediju Bell, P. Rangamani, S. E. Sakiyama-Elbert, S. D. Finley, R. K. Willits, A. N. Koppes, N. C. Chesler, K. L. Christman, J. B. Allen, J. Y. Wong, H. El-Samad, T. A. Desai, and O. Eniola-Adefeso. 2021. Fund Black scientists. Cell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.01.011