Academics have long referred to their field as a leaky pipeline — gradually bleeding researchers from marginalized communities as they progress through their careers.
A new paper, published Monday, suggests that grant terminations from the National Institutes of Health over the past year may have further punctured that pipeline. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that women, particularly those early in their careers, were disproportionately affected by terminations, even though they receive less funding from the NIH in general.
Women lost a larger chunk of their grant funds than men — on average women had 57.9% of their grant terminated, while men had 48.2%. Among doctoral students and assistant professors, 60% of terminated grants were led by women. (Men made up the majority of postdoctoral fellows, associate professors, and full professors whose grants were cancelled).
“This is a great paper that confirms what I have been hearing in the community. Young and female investigators disproportionately lost NIH funding,” said Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who has studied the demographics of who the NIH funds, but was not affiliated with the new paper. “It is disappointing to see that many of these grants were training grants that will have the impact of derailing scientific careers just as they are getting started.”
In response to the new study, an NIH spokesperson said, “In 2025, the NIH allocated its full budget, providing funding to scientists at all stages of their careers who are performing high-impact science. NIH supports a fair and objective review process that evaluates proposals based on scientific merit. Any other suggestion is false.” They added that NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya is committed to expanding opportunities for early-career researchers through broadening geographic distribution of funding and the “Unified Funding Strategy,” which was implemented in December and “considers career stage, reduces reliance on score cutoffs, and allows funding decisions to reflect workforce needs, funding distribution, and the full peer review context.”
Gendered disparities in who the NIH funds predate the Trump administration. The number of grants awarded to women have historically lagged behind the number awarded to men, but the proportion of grants to women has steadily increased over the past three decades. In recent years, women have made up more than half of the awardees for training grants. But many disparities still persist. Even for women that are funded, they tend to receive less money than men, and are less likely to hold several NIH grants at once. Women are also underrepresented on study sections, the external peer review bodies that help determine which grants are funded.
“The main implication is that funding shocks do not affect all researchers equally, they interact with existing structural features of the system,” said Diego F. M. Oliveira, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of North Dakota and an author of the paper. “In our data, women and early-career researchers were more likely to hold smaller grants and to be in earlier stages of those projects when funding was cut. That combination matters because it means a larger portion of their planned research activity was interrupted.”
The lower rates of funding for women means they are also less likely to be able to weather grant terminations, added Mytien Nguyen, an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate at Yale University who has studied inequities in “elite” investigators — those who have more than three concurrent grants. Such researchers are mostly white and mostly men. The precarity of searching for funding and operating on smaller budgets could also mean that female principal investigators do not have as much license to pursue innovative ideas.
“You do notice the incredible amount of privilege of being in a well-funded lab, where you don’t have to worry about finding the cheapest antibodies, for example, also having the academic and mental emotional freedom to pursue whatever risky research question you pursue, which oftentimes leads to novel findings,” said Nguyen, whose lab head is an “elite PI.”
It is not just female early-career researchers that fared poorly during the first year of the second Trump administration: The number of Black researchers who received “fellowship” grants in 2025 dropped precipitously. In 2024, the NIH funded 205 such awards, and in 2025 that figure was 122, a 40% drop. (Such grants for white researchers also dropped, by 9%). This data was first reported by the blogger DrugMonkey.
The drop may be, in part, because of the topics that marginalized researchers tend to study. “Women and scientists of color are more likely to study topics that get caught up in the dragnet of being woke,” said Ginther. Indeed, research done by NIH scientists suggests that Black applicants tend to propose research on population health, rather than on basic science, which are funded less frequently.
It may also be explained by the fact that the administration has targeted programs and funding mechanisms meant to diversify the sciences. For example, the NIH terminated 405 F31 awards, which are meant to fund doctoral students — and most were “diversity” awards. The termination of those awards is particularly jarring, because students who fit into any of the categories that fall into the NIH’s definition of “diverse” are often encouraged to apply for those awards.
“You’re getting mixed signals as to what you represent, and the kind of work that you should be doing,” said Jahn Jaramillo, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Miami who recently published an analysis of the F31 awards that were terminated after his own grant was terminated. His grant, which had received a perfect peer review score, was on HIV in the Latino immigrant community. In some ways, the grant was squarely within the priorities of the Trump administration, which announced a plan in 2019 to end the HIV epidemic. Miami, where Jaramillo is based, is an area of high priority for that initiative. The work also felt particularly meaningful to Jaramillo, as a way to help communities he is part of.
But now, it feels as if his identities are being weaponized. “I was able to do that kind of community outreach work. You speak the language, you’re very close to the community, so you’re able to get research participants that perhaps had never engaged in research before,” Jaramillo said. But when his grant was terminated halfway through the project, he added, “you’re disappointing them, you’re confusing them. That has long-term impacts with regards to them trusting research.”
