An array of basic science research in the United States is supported by the National Science Foundation, a federal organization that provides several billion dollars in grants annually.
White scientists are generally more successful than Black, Latino, and other nonwhite scientists at receiving federal research funding from the National Science Foundation, according to a recent study. Asian-born scientists lag behind the most.
An array of basic science research in the United States is supported by the National Science Foundation, a federal organization that provides several billion dollars in grants annually. These fields of study include biology, chemistry, computer science, geosciences, mathematics, and physics. The N.S.F. frequently gives academics like university professors the vital federal research funding support they need to succeed in their careers.
In contrast to the widespread perception that Asian Americans predominate in the sciences and engineering fields in the United States, the success rate of proposals led by Asian scientists is about 20 percent lower than the overall rate. This disparity has persisted for two decades. The results are presented in a paper that was released in November by the journal eLife.
Geoscientist Christine Yifeng Chen, who is the lead author of the eLife paper and works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said, “There’s this model minority myth, which is a stereotype, that suggests that Asians don’t experience academic challenges.” And that’s untrue, I say.
Dr. Chen admits that there is insufficient information in the public NSF reports to conduct a thorough analysis of the disparities. The NSF did not respond to the paper’s authors’ request for more precise data. Racial disparities in research have recently been acknowledged by numerous universities and other institutions.
This does not necessarily imply that organisations intentionally discriminate against non-Whites.Instead, the bias might be unintentional and unconscious. An Ivy League university researcher might, for instance, be regarded more favourably than a researcher from a historically Black institution by the reviewer of a funding request.
The problem is echoed in a commentary written by Yuh Nung Jan, a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, that was published in the journal Cell last year and revealed how few top awards were given to Asian researchers in the field of biomedicine.
Dr. Jan discovered that even though Asian scientists now make up more than a fifth of researchers in these fields, only 57, or less than 7%, of the 838 winners of American biomedical prizes were Asian.