Race in Science

The news was full of reports about breathless claims of racism in awarding science grants. Careful reading past the headlines would tell you this was in the National Institutes of Health. But where were the details? Forbes has details. Look beyond the headline and read the story.

While the data showed no racial disparity in award rates for grant proposals that earned high priority scores through peer-review, it seems that mediocre proposals from white scientists were 10% more likely to ultimately receive funding than mediocre proposals from black scientists.

And then when you look in more detail at the proposals you discover that the disparity has other origins.

Bill Frezza's observations are mine also: far from being old-boy bastions of racism, science in academia courts minorities and has special mentoring programs for women. I was on the committee to select the previous department chairman, and was startled at how many people said "We should have a woman this time." (We did.) To be fair, the group I was tasked with interviewing are, like me, not professors; and often our circles aren't as wide. So we typically have frequent contacts with people in the research group and not so many out of it. Outside the group we often have to guess based on reputation, or on a kind of fairness: "High Energy provided the chairman last time, and Plasma before that, so maybe it is Nuclear's turn." Hence the "this time" yardstick.

You are expected to deliver--the peer reviews I've worked with looked at the material, and were not informed of the race of the person submitting the paper. In some fields you know everybody anyway, of course.