People ask me a lot, why diversity, why is it important? And of course, it's often conceptualized
as an affirmative action, but I think we've moved far beyond that. It is important to
maintain and improve the excellence of academic institutions. We are now facing, in health
care some really complicated issues and for solving complex problems you need diversity
of thought and diversity of perspective. As Scott Page in his wonderful book about difference
puts it, if you put a bunch of high level experts together to solve a problem that are
of a homogenous group or you put a high level group--a not so high level group of a heterogeneous
group, the heterogeneous group wins out all the time for coming up with creative solutions.
I think the NIH invests a lot of money in training people but the number of people who
end up being principle investigators and the diversity of the principle investigator pool
does not reflect the diversity of the people who are being trained even. Women don't make
it to the PI ranks, people of color don't make it to the PI ranks. I think you want
to have as an inclusive a research workforce as possible, because there are, having a different
background is going to influence your science. And so you need a diversity of opinions to
move the science forward.
I've found that black investigators are significantly less likely to receive NIH funding compared
to whites and we can explain part of the gap, but we certainly can't explain all of it.
The implications of the findings are that it's either proposal quality or bias or problems
with the review process and we're doing further studies to try to understand exactly how to
best, sort of, address these issues. So I think that regardless, sort of, providing
applicants with the unwritten rules of how to be successful in the grant process would
be helpful. It would be, in disease you always don't know the mechanism but with the disease
but if you know the treatment, if you know that a treatment works you give a treatment.
See if it works. I would recommend that the NIH consider something like that.
People actually are wired, I believe, to look at role models in order to encourage them
in anything that they do. And so, for example, if you come into academic medicine and you
don't see many other professors who are of the same racial background as you, and for
that matter you don't see many residents and so forth, then when faced with challenges
which might actually be normal that everybody else is faced with, an underrepresented minority
person is more likely to be, to feel they have to leave and not have the resilience
to stick with it and to stay the course. The approaches to increasing diversity both in
terms of gender and race are a little bit different, although I do believe that if you
approach it in terms of the lens for women and do all the things that we think are important
for recruiting and retaining women a lot of them will actually have a very positive effect
in the recruitment and retention also of underrepresented minorities.