ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Shurjeel Uddin Qazi, MD; Jeanne Cawse-Lucas, MD; Mehwish Hussain, MD; Kiran Khurshid, MD; Faisal Khosa, MD, MBA, TI, FFRRCSI, FRCPC, FACR
Corresponding Author: Faisal Khosa, MD, MBA, TI, FFRRCSI, FRCPC, FACR; Department of Radiology, Vancouver General Hospital.
Email: fkhosa@gmail.com
DOI: 10.3122/jabfm.2025.250118R1
Keywords: Academic Success, Bibliometrics, Faculty, Family Medicine, Funds, Grants, Gender Equity, National Institutes of Health, Women Physicians
Dates: Submitted: 03-26-2025; Revised: 08-27-2025; Accepted: 09-08-2025
Status: Volume 39, Issue 1 (Publishes March 2026)
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The present study investigated the current trends of gender disparity in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding patterns for research within Family Medicine.
METHODS: Funding data was collected from the online NIH RePORTER system for fiscal years 2017-2020, and information regarding each Principal Investigator (PI) was retrieved from the Scopus database and departmental websites. Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests were performed on collected data for statistical comparison of continuous variables.
RESULTS: We analyzed 730 grants in our analysis. Amongst them, 398 (54.5%) were awarded to women PIs and 332 (45.5%) to men PIs. The mean NIH grant amount awarded to men PIs ($518,862 ± $490,793.32) was significantly higher than the mean grant amount awarded to women PIs ($450,195 ± $428,405.62) (p = 0.04). The strongest correlation between NIH funding and academic output was observed for the number of publications of men PIs. When the gender of PI and co-PI were analyzed together, there was no significant difference in the number of grants or mean grant amount. Stratification by academic degree revealed no significant difference between both genders for the mean NIH grant amount.
CONCLUSIONS: Despite the increasing representation of women within the discipline of family medicine, men continue to receive higher average NIH grant amounts compared to women. The differences are multifactorial and may include differences in academic productivity or grant committees’ heuristics. Overall, the results were promising with little evidence of significant gender disequilibrium within NIH funding for researchers in family medicine.