Are we bridging the gap? A ten-year probe into NIH grants for early-career and independent investigators in oncology.
Authors: Khan Sara Ahmed , Eshaghi Faraz , Kotwal Serena , Rehman Mohammed Z , Salama Amy , Khan Kainat , Farooq Muhammad Zain , Kumar Kapisthalam 
Published: June 2024

9010

Background: Ongoing gender disparities persist within National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, specifically evident in NIH R01 grants within Oncology. A crucial aspect of addressing this issue involves a comprehensive investigation of discrepancies between early-career and independent principal investigators (PI). Here we present a ten-year analysis of gender distribution of early career vs. independent grants in the NIH under the field of Oncology. Methods: We implemented an R script utilizing NIH rePORTER, tidyverse, and janitor libraries for data retrieval. This script defined fields for retrieval which looped over fiscal years 2012 to 2022. The script executed API requests with criteria that included fiscal years, activity codes, and search terms that are relevant to oncology to extract grants from NIH rePORTER. We defined the early-career grant category to encompass the top 3 most active NIH K and F grants (K01,K08,K23, F31,F32,F33). In contrast, the independent research grant category included the top 3 most active NIH R grants (R01,R21,R35). The gender library was used to predict the gender of each principal investigator (PI) based on their first name. Ggplot and gtsummary packages were employed for data visualization and statistical analysis, automatically selecting appropriate tests based on data type. Results: Over the fiscal years 2012 to 2022, a total of 44,545 active early-career grants were funded by the NIH. Females (n = 24,243: 54.4% [95% CI:53.7%,55.0%]) surpassed their male counterparts (n = 20,302: 45.6% [95% CI:44.9%, 46.3%]) by holding more active early-career research grants. From 2012 to 2022, there was a significant upward trend that was noted in active early-career grants funded to females (1,818 to 2,969, p < 0.01). Similarly, males exhibited a noteworthy increase in these grants when comparing 2012 to 2022 (1,780 to 1,986, p < 0.001). Despite both genders experiencing an uptrend in active early-career NIH grants, females demonstrated a 48.3% increase, while males experienced a more modest 11.5% increase. In comparison, a total of 236,804 active independent research NIH grants were disbursed in the NIH R category from 2012 to 2022. Females (78,439: 33.1% [95% CI:32.7%,33.4%]) had fewer active independent NIH research grants compared to males (158,365: 66.9% [95% CI:66.6%,67.1%]). Males observed a 6.4% increase in independent NIH grants, rising from 14,419 to 15,343, while females exhibited a notable 48% increase, expanding from 6,193 to 9,195, from 2012 to 2022. Conclusions: In the realm of oncology, gender disparities are not evident among early career investigators as there were 53.7% of early career grants funded to females over the decade. Conversely, females accounted for only 33.3% of independent research grants. These observations emphasize the importance for targeted interventions to foster equal opportunities within the field of Oncology.