Report on Research Compliance 18, no. 4 (April 2021)
Following social injustice protests over police brutality against Black people and the health disparities accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, an advisory committee assisting NIH with diversity efforts has recommended[1] that the agency require institutions to report acts of racial discrimination, details of their programs to promote faculty members who are Black and other related metrics. NIH should then annually issue “report cards for institutions and principal investigators that receive NIH funding.”
The recommendations are part of the Racism in Science Report[2] that the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) adopted and forwarded to Francis Collins for action during a recent special meeting. Although there is some overlap, the report was written by the ACD’s Working Group on Diversity, composed of high-ranking university representatives, and is separate from a new initiative to combat structural racism NIH developed called UNITE, which was also unveiled at the meeting.[3]
Typically the ACD meets twice a year—in June and December. The Feb. 26 meeting was devoted entirely to discussion of the report and UNITE, which NIH created to “identify and address structural racism within the NIH-supported and the greater scientific community.” NIH also issued a statement against racism,[4] launched a new website,[5] and issued a request for information (RFI).[6]
UNITE also includes a five-year commitment of $60 million from NIH’s Common Fund for 20 awards that will help “foster the development, testing, and dissemination of innovative interventions focused on elimination of health disparities broadly and in high priority areas” and increase investigator competitiveness and the research base dedicated to health disparities research at minority-serving institutions.[7]
The initiative takes its name from five committees with “separate but coordinated objectives on tackling the problem of racism and discrimination in science, while developing methods to promote diversity and inclusion across the biomedical enterprise,” as follows:[8]
Understanding stakeholder experiences through listening and learning
New research on health disparities, minority health, and health equity
Improving the NIH Culture and Structure for Equity, Inclusion, and Excellence
Transparency, communication, and accountability with our internal and external stakeholders
Extramural Research Ecosystem: Changing Policy, Culture, and Structure to Promote Workforce Diversity
Reporting May Foster Accountability
Prior to the UNITE discussion, M. Roy Wilson, president of Wayne State University and co-chair of the diversity working group, presented an overview of Racism in Science. Wilson’s co-chair, Marie Bernard, told RRC in an interview that release of the report was timed to coincide with the announcement of the UNITE initiative but that it was developed independently during the summer. Bernard is NIH’s acting chief officer for scientific workforce diversity and deputy director of the National Institute on Aging.
Racism in Science offered four themes and “suggestions” for how NIH “can address racism in the scientific workforce and improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.” Although the term “report card” does not appear in Racism in Science, it was used by Wilson in his presentation to the ACD. The idea comes under the theme of making structural changes to mitigate the impact of racism and implicit bias in the scientific workforce.
The suggestions are to “create incentives for institutions to enhance representation and diversity through training programs and community-based partnerships,” “implement trainings and standards for admissions and hiring committees to mitigate the impact of racism and implicit bias” and “create annual DEI reporting requirements for researchers and institutions funded by NIH.”
For NIH to “hold the scientific community accountable for the DEI efforts, NIH could issue annual report cards for principal investigators and institutions that receive NIH funding,” Wilson said, adding that “the elements of the report card are specified in this report.”
Data sharing is important to “facilitate progress in DEI within the scientific community,” the report said. Metrics to be mandated to be reported could include:
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“Diversity recruitment efforts and their success rates
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“The percentage of faculty who are Black” and/or from other under-represented groups (URGs)
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“Descriptions of URG mentorship and sponsorship programs
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“Efforts to promote faculty members who are Black and/or from other URGs
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“Results of racial climate surveys” and
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“Information on any reported acts of racial discrimination and how these situations were handled”
“Requesting this type of information will demonstrate that NIH strongly values DEI and is monitoring NIH-funded institutions’ commitment to these values,” according to the report. “This will ultimately incentivize institutions to commit to combatting racial discrimination, enhancing diversity, and improving the culture at their institutions.”
Another suggestion for NIH in this regard is to “create and enhance training and career pathway programs that encourage students from URGs to pursue degrees and jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”
After his presentation, Wilson commented that now is “an important juncture in our nation’s experience and reckoning with race.”
Wilson: ‘Leverage the Positive’
“On the one hand, the spotlight has really been shown brightly in exposing inequities that have disadvantaged Black people for centuries. And this has had a positive effect, in that many people and institutions are using this moment to assess their own contributions to systemic racism and to make meaningful change,” Wilson said. “But I’m also, I would probably say, bewildered [by] what I would say are acts of overt racism that are being played out with increasing frequency and blatant openness. So we have to leverage the positive momentum to overcome this negative. NIH is in a unique position to move the needle in addressing systemic racism in the scientific workforce [and to] promote cultural change in the scientific community.”
The ACD accepted Racism in Science at the meeting and forwarded it officially to Collins for action. Neither Collins nor NIH Deputy Director Larry Tabak addressed the recommendations, although Tabak called Racism in Science “compelling.”
Bernard told RRC no decisions have been made on the recommendations for additional reporting requirements by principal investigators or institutions.
Some of the recommendations in the racism report are “actually already addressed by the UNITE initiative, but we are looking very carefully, cross-walking those recommendations versus what we’re doing in UNITE and seeing where there are gaps and opportunities,” she said.
“We’re certainly thinking about ways in which we can approach [spurring] a cultural transformation so that systems that in the past may have impeded full representation among the workforce would be modified,” Bernard added. “Part of that would potentially be to be transparent about the data.” She noted that NIH is still developing plans for addressing structural racism. “Our announcement on February 26th was the announcement of a start of a process,” Bernard said.
She added that there’s “certainly a move afoot to be much more transparent about who we have funded—the demographics of those individuals. That’s something that is more within our control currently than a mandate that institutions report back.”
Universities and other research organizations may be most interested in the work of the “E” or extramural committee; its charge is to “perform a broad systematic evaluation of NIH extramural policies and processes to identify and change practices and structures that perpetuate a lack of inclusivity and diversity within the extramural research ecosystem,” which includes “developing strategies to address funding disparities and increase applications that would support individuals from under-represented groups.”
Extramural Involvement is ‘Very Important’
One recommendation from this committee that NIH has already implemented is to issue the RFI. According to the March 1 RFI, which has a deadline for comments of April 9, the agency is seeking “input on practical and effective ways to improve the racial and ethnic diversity and inclusivity of research environments and diversity of the biomedical research workforce across the United States, to the extent permitted by law.”
The primary focus of the RFI is “actions and solutions—through policy, procedure, or practice—NIH should consider in order to promote positive culture and structural change through effective interventions, leading to greater inclusiveness and diversity.” The open-ended RFI solicits “approaches and strategies that can be implemented in the short-term (e.g., within the next three to six months), as well as those that can be implemented within the next one to three years.”
“The extramural community is very important” to NIH’s efforts, Bernard explained, noting that the committees are composed of NIH staff “from multiple institutes and centers [who have] multiple job roles. But in order for the ‘E’ committee to be fully effective, they are really interested in the RFI [responses]. Somehow or another doing listening sessions is in their vision,” although there are no specific plans yet for these, Bernard said.
“The RFI is the first attempt to make outreach to the external scientific workforce, and world, and we need to get those data back to get a better understanding of where things stand to plan the sort of outreach that we need to make externally,” Bernard said. “Internally we are already planning to start with listening sessions and focus groups with our internal staff because our intent is not only to look outward, but also look inward. Our goal, as with all efforts, is to role-model the sort of structures and behaviors we would expect outside institutions to have.”
The “E” committee is also “looking at career pathways, institutional culture, our own processes that may serve as barriers [and] what’s happening at minority-serving institutions,” she added. Noting that this committee and the others have been working since October, members of the “E” panel “have been spending their time trying to get their arms around this very large charge and figure out what are the actionable things that are appropriate in the short term, medium term and long term.” What members develop “will be very much influenced by what we see from the RFI.”
RFI Quickly Attracts 200 Responses
Bernard said NIH itself has “some clear benchmarks and things in the short term that we’d like to achieve,” such as the RFI and the Common Fund “initiative that was approved in concept” at the ACD meeting. NIH is also acting to quickly issue related notices of funding opportunities, she added. “There are a lot of things that have gotten started but there are a lot of additional things that we will be adding to our menu as we pick up the pace with this project.”
Within just two weeks of issuing the RFI, NIH had received nearly 200 responses, Bernard said, but more participation is encouraged. With a large volume, it is less likely that NIH will release the comments received in their entirety, but it will issue an analysis and summary along with “recurrent themes” and any overall recommendations that emerge, Bernard said.
Although there is no timetable for sharing the RFI submissions, Bernard said she expects NIH officials will be “working hard” to have an analysis ready to be presented to the ACD at its next regularly scheduled meeting this summer. Any release of the comments prior to the meeting will be accompanied by an announcement. Collins and other NIH officials are also hoping to publish an article about the UNITE initiative in a journal in the near future, she said.
Interested institutions and others should regularly check the UNITE website at http://bit.ly/3eXEdqT for new development and updates, Bernard said.
1 Marie A. Bernard and M. Roy Wilson, “122nd Meeting of the Advisory Committee to the Director,” NIH Advisory Committee to the Director, Working Group on Diversity, February 26, 2021, https://bit.ly/3r4cN58.
2 Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group on Diversity, Racism in Science Report, February 14, 2021, https://bit.ly/2P4movn.
3 Advisory Committee to the Director, Videocast, February 26, 2021, http://bit.ly/391fz50.
4 Francis Collins, “NIH stands against structural racism in biomedical research,” NIH, March 1, 2021, http://bit.ly/3r5tX2d.
5 “Ending Structural Racism,” NIH, accessed March 22, 2021, http://bit.ly/3tDY2HP.
6 Request for Information (RFI): Inviting Comments and Suggestions to Advance and Strengthen Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Biomedical Research Workforce and Advance Health Disparities and Health Equity Research, Notice Number: NOT-OD-21-066, March 1, 2021, https://bit.ly/3c4VUDb.
7 Advisory Committee to the Director, “Transformative Research to Address Health Disparities and Advance Health Equity Common Fund Concept Discussion,” NIH, February 26, 2021, https://bit.ly/3lvEpic.
8 Marie A. Bernard, Alfred Johnson, and Lawrence A. Tabak, “Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Biomedical Research,” presentation to the Advisory Committee to the Director, February 26, 2021, https://bit.ly/2QjaZs9.
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