A team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health has found that women in biomedical sciences are just as successful as men in sustaining grant funding. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of grant approval rates for men and women in the biomedical sciences.

Prior research has shown that despite receiving approximately half of all advanced degrees in the biomedical sciences, women are still vastly underrepresented in tenured positions at major universities. It has been suggested by some in the field that part of the reason for this disparity is the view held by many women who pursue advanced degrees that they will have limited opportunities should they pursue an academic career path. The researchers note that such a path generally involves becoming successful at applying for grants to carry out research. The researchers further suggest that many women believe this path is biased against women and thus choose to pursue careers in the corporate world as a more viable alternative. But are such beliefs justified? That is what the researchers sought to learn.

To find out, the researchers ran queries on databases maintained by NIH that hold information regarding grants for the years 1991 through 2010. In so doing, they compared rates of success for first-time applicants as well as for those who apply for and receive grants repeatedly. They found that male first-time applicants far outnumbered female first-time applicants. But they also found that the rates of success for women who applied for and received grants repeatedly were much closer. And when they compared success rates by age and amount of education, they found that the rates were nearly identical for the two genders. The researchers suggest that this indicates that the so-called "leaky pipeline" is not applicable to women in the biomedical sciences. They further suggest that there is a degree of misinformation surrounding opportunities for women in the biomedical sciences and that more needs to be done to counteract it.

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