FLICKR, CTBTO PHOTOSTREAMA 2011–2012 report on the demographics of the scientific workforce of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed a very dismal state of diversity at our nation’s premier biomedical and behavioral sciences research agency: only 1.2 percent of tenure track faculty and 1.1 percent of senior investigators were African American, and the proportion of Hispanics was not much better, hovering around 3 percent. These numbers suggest little progress from what was recently described in Science by economist Donna Ginther of the University of Kansas and colleagues as “a long history of working to increase the diversity of its intramural and extramural biomedical workforce.” Given the agency’s efforts—and financial support—to diversify the biomedical workforce at leading research universities and institutions, this is a dismal failure.
The NIH of course has lots of diversity: almost every janitor, dish washer, mail man, and parking lot attendant is a minority! When I first started working at the NIH in 2011 as a Ruth Kirschstein Fellow, I could not find a black barber in either Potomac or Bethesda, Maryland, but I did find one at the Clinical Center on the NIH campus. The lack of diversity within the NIH’s scientific ranks, however, was a surprise to me. Despite not being reflected in the numbers, the NIH’s efforts to diversify the extramural biomedical research workforce have personally impacted me, an African American scientist. The research and research education activities in my career, first at Tuskegee University (TU), one of the leading Historically Black Colleges and ...
