The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

On a semi-regular basis I like to do a news search on “women in science” just to see what comes up on the search engine radar.  I stumbled across an article about the lack of gender diversity in prestigious scientific awards in Canada.  The author of this Canadian article was trying to figure out why none of the recipients of these prestigious awards were women.  She listed the search criteria of the nominating committees and how certain criteria would automatically create a gender bias:

In the first stage, 40 proposals defining specific areas of research were approved as target areas for recruitment. Already we have a problem: Narrowly defining a research area is never a good way to find the very best and in this case it biased the pools towards male nominees.

In the second stage, the groups conducted searches for super-star candidates to fit their targeted research area. Here we run into serious problems. There is no transparency. We don’t know the composition of the committees nor how they conducted their searches. By all accounts, they were conducted by “informal networking,” a process that is highly susceptible to discrimination, even when all concerned have the best intentions. Why did all of the groups nominate men?

As I read further into her article she brought up search criteria that was developed by the United States National Institute of Health (NIH) for their Director’s Pioneer Award that led it to be a success in gender diversity.

Perhaps we can learn from the experience of our neighbours to the south. The American NIH Pioneer Awards are five-year $2.5 million grants to support highly innovative research. In the first year that they were offered, nine out of nine awards went to white men; in that year 61 out of the 64 judges were men. Members of the scientific community, both men and women, protested loudly. In 2005 awards went to six women and seven men. What was different?

The turnaround in the Pioneer Program was a consequence of the implementation of clear guidelines about how searches should be conducted. These guidelines include a wide-reaching call for nominations, encouragement of self-nomination, a search committee that is representative of the research community and a final review of the deliberation to ensure that gender diversity has been reasonably accounted for in the final pool of candidates.

I wanted to see for myself how successful this NIH award program was at nominating a diverse group of candidates, and I have to say it is great!  Take a look at the award recipients from 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.  since the program committee changed their search strategy in 2005 they have awarded 35% of their Pioneer awards to women scientists.  {Optix gives NIH a high five!}

It can be seen from the changes that NIH implemented that the old way of doing things in the areas of awarding scientific excellence were indeed biased toward men.  This strategy that is being used at NIH should be reviewed and considered by many other groups within and outside the area of science.  Whenever a committee is looking for a slate of potential exceptional candidates and the goal is gender diversity, the NIH’s guidelines can help structure the search to meet that goal.