In hard times in NIH Grantlandia, guess who pays the steepest price?

A post over at Rock Talk blog describes some recent funding data from the NIH. The takeaway message is that every thing is down. Fewer grants awarded, fewer percentages of the applications being funded. Not exactly news to my audience. However, head over to the NIH data book for some interesting tidbits.

First up, my oldest soapbox, the new investigator. As you can see, up to FY2006 the PI who had not previously had any NIH funding faced a steeper hurdle to get a new grant (Type 1) funding compared to established investigators. This was despite the “New Investigator” checkbox at the top of the application and the fact that reviewers were instructed to give such applications a break. And they did in my experience….just not enough to actually get them funded. Study section discussion that ended with “…but this investigator is new and highly promising so that’s why I’m giving it such a good score…[insert clearly unfundable post-discussion score]” were not uncommon during my term of appointed service. So round about FY2007 the prior NIH Director, Zerhouni, put in place an affirmative action system to fund newly-transitioned independent investigators. There’s a great description in this Science news bit [PDF]. You can see the result below.

Interestingly, this will to maintain success rates of the inexperienced PIs at levels similar to the experienced PIs has evaporated for FY2011 and FY2013. See title.

Next, the slightly more subtle case of women PIs. This will be a two-grapher. First, the overall Research Project Grant success rate broken down by PI sex. As you can see, up through FY2002 there was a disparity which disappeared in the subsequent years. Miracle? Hell no. I guarantee you there has been some placing of the affirmative action fingers on the scale for the sex disparity as well. Fortunately, the elastic hasn’t snapped back in the past two FYs as it has for inexperienced investigators. But I’m keeping a suspicious eye on it, as should you. Notice how women trickle along juuuuust a little bit behind men? Interesting, isn’t it, how the disparity is never actually reversed? You know, because if whomever was previously advantaged even slipped back to disadvantaged (instead of merely equal) the whole world would end.

Moving along, we downshift to R01-equivalent grants so as to perform the analysis of new proposals versus competing continuation (aka, “renewal”) applications. There are mechanisms included in the “RPG” grouping that cannot be continued so this is necessary. What we find is that the disparity for woman PIs in continuing their R01/equivalent grants has been maintained all along. New grants have been level in recent years. There is a halfway decent bet that this may be down to the graybeard factor. This hypothesis depends on the idea that the longer a given R01 has been continued, the higher the success rate for each subsequent renewal. These data also show that a goodly amount of the sex disparity up through FY2002 was addressed at the renewal stage. Not all of it. But clearly gains were made. This kind of selectivity suggests the heavy hand of affirmative action quota filling to me.

This is why I am pro-quota and totally in support of the heavy hand of Program in redressing study section biases, btw. Over time, it is the one thing that helps. Awareness, upgrading women’s representation on study section (see the early 1970s)…New Investigator checkboxes and ESI initiatives* all fail. Quota-making works.

__
*In that Science bit I link it says:

Told about the quotas, study sections began “punishing the young investigators with bad scores,” says Zerhouni. That is, a previous slight gap in review scores for new grant applications from firsttime and seasoned investigators widened in 2007 and 2008, Berg says. It revealed a bias against new investigators, Zerhouni says.