Gender Differences in National Institutes of Health Funding for Family Medicine Faculty

The present study investigated the current trends of gender disparity in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding patterns for research within Family Medicine.

Funding data was collected from the online NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditure and Results (RePORTER) system for fiscal years 2017-2020, and information regarding each Principal Investigator (PI) was retrieved from the Scopus database and departmental websites. Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests were performed on collected data for statistical comparison of continuous variables.

We analyzed 730 grants in our analysis. Amongst them, 398 (54.5%) were awarded to women PIs and 332 (45.5%) to men PIs. The mean NIH grant amount awarded to men PIs (518,862±490,793.32) was significantly higher than the mean grant amount awarded to women PIs (450,195±428,405.62) (p = 0.04). The strongest correlation between NIH funding and academic output was observed for the number of publications of men PIs. When the gender of PI and co-PI were analyzed together, there was no significant difference in the number of grants or mean grant amount. Stratification by academic degree revealed no significant difference between both genders for the mean NIH grant amount.

Despite the increasing representation of women within the discipline of family medicine, men continue to receive higher average NIH grant amounts compared to women. The differences are multifactorial and may include differences in academic productivity or grant committees' heuristics. Overall, the results were promising with little evidence of significant gender disequilibrium within NIH-funding for researchers in FM.