NIH Looks towards Future Diversity
Dear friends of women in science,
In the latest newsletter from NIH, Dr. Sally Rockey described the Advisory Committee to the Director's presentations recently on how NIH can best address increasing the diversity of its workforce. As we've discussed earlier, that diversity emphasis at NIH includes a focus on supporting women in science.
Dr. Rockey says that there were three main components discussed re diversity, two on mentoring and one would focus on detecting and mitigating bias in reviews. The first, as she puts it "BUilding Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) provides rigorous mentored research experiences for undergraduate students, resources to help faculty train highly effective mentors, and more." The second program is a network they will create. She describes it this way, "National Research Mentoring Network to connect students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty with experienced mentors - in-person and virtually - as well as provide relevant workshops and training opportunities in grantsmanship. The BUILD program and NRMN will form a consortium to link trainees and investigators from groups that have been underrepresented in science to majority investigators." I'm sure some people will be helped by these initiatives, but personally I would not have seen them as a high priority need. CUR (Council on Undergraduate Research), for example, has been mentoring students and faculty quite successfully for many years. And the Mentor Network does one-on-one matching across all the STEM fields and is well established. I'm just not sure how much new structures will add.
The third program she described in this category is a program to "test multiple interventions to assess and mitigate the effects of implicit bias in peer review, including diversity awareness training for both scientific review officers and members of review panels." I would strongly favor this plan, since the recent PNAS paper we discussed on this forum, by Handelsman and others at Yale, shows implicit bias against women is still alive and well, and is strongly denied by people who have been shown by their study to have it. They plan to hire a diversity officer to "not only coordinate diversity initiatives, but to oversee a rigorous prospective evaluation of existing extramural and intramural diversity programs, and join NIH's intramural program as a practicing scientist." This could be a good opportunity for you or someone you know.
cheers,
Laura
Like Chrissy, I'd like to see them pay more attention to these issues. But I have to agree with Laura that what they are proposing is really not well thought out.
Where is the incentive for these mentors to give their time? Without recruiting more high quality mentors, I doubt the impact will improve.
Additionally, if you don't change the gamemanship of academia, all you are doing is continuing a vicious cycle for women and minorities.
I would rather see them shift the focus to reducing bias which certainly is an important issue for all minorities in science.
Helen
Hi Chrissy,
I know, it's true that NIH didn't always take increasing the diversity of the scientific work force seriously and now it does. But I don't think saying I would direct the funds differently is meant to imply I think they should stop trying to work on this issue. It may well be too late for any reconsideration as well, at this point. I just know NIH has so much more money than NSF I would love it to be used for some thing like child care support for biomed grad students and postdocs, which is a crying need in my opinion.
best,
Laura
Dear Laura,
I don't think it's a good idea to criticize what the NIH wants to do about diversity, because for so long they simply said it wasn't their job and they were just to focus on biomedical research achievements, not social issues. We don't want to go back to those bad old days.
Crissy
