The disparity in funding between white and nonwhite applicants has remained largely unchanged in the past three decades. UCSF epidemiologist Sam Oh found that in 2013, 23.3% of white applicants for certain NIH grants received funding compared with 19.3% of nonwhite applicants. In 1985 those numbers were 48.6% and 42.1% for white versus nonwhite applicants.3 “The big takeaway,” Oh says, “is that white and nonwhite scientists have been getting funded at systematically different rates for the past three decades.”
