Career choices of underrepresented and female postdocs in the biomedical sciences
- Weill Cornell Medicine, United States
- Cornell University, United States
- Columbia University, United States
Abstract
The lack of diversity among faculty at universities and medical schools in the United States is a matter of growing concern. However, the factors that influence the career choices of underrepresented minority and female postdoctoral researchers have received relatively little attention. Here we report the results of a survey of 1284 postdocs working in the biomedical sciences in the US. Our findings highlight possible reasons why some underrepresented minority and female postdocs choose not to pursue careers in academic research, and suggest interventions that could be taken in the early stages of postdoctoral training to prevent this attrition of underrepresented groups.
Data availability
To protect the privacy and confidentiality of the research participants, the raw datasets are not available in online databases. Summary data for institutions, fields, and regions with sufficient numbers are available upon request.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (Award Number UL1TR002384)
- W Marcus Lambert
- Matthew F Cipriano
- Jacob N Sneva
- Linnie M Golightly
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (K24 AI110732)
- Linnie M Golightly
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All work was done under the approval of the Weill Cornell Medicine Institutional Review Board (IRB# 1612017849), and all respondents provided consent for participation in the study.
Copyright
© 2020, Lambert et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Career choices of underrepresented and female postdocs in the biomedical sciences
eLife 9:e48774.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48774
Further reading
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The research community needs to do more to support scientists from underrepresented groups.
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What contributes to members of underrepresented communities leaving academia?
