BACKGROUND: The Lancet Commission on women, power, and cancer recommends that women have equitable access to cancer research resources, leadership, and funding opportunities. To measure progress towards this recommendation, the International Cancer Research Partnership (ICRP) reviewed the proportion of funding in its database for oncology research allocated to female principal investigators (PIs). METHODS: The gender of PIs reported on over 120,000 projects in the ICRP database funded between 2006 - 2022 was estimated using a name-based algorithm. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to identify differences in research projects led by male and female PIs, including stratifications by start year, funder organization country, PI country, cancer scientific outline code, cancer site, total funding amount, and career mechanism. RESULTS: Over 63% of funded cancer research in the ICRP database was led by a male PI, with 36% led by a female PI and the remaining 1% led by PIs reported as unknown or unreported gender. While there is evidence of modest growth of the percentage of female PIs over time, women lead fewer than 50% of grants across nearly all domains of research. CONCLUSION: These results align with findings from other scientific fields and bibliometric analyses of cancer research publications and demonstrate substantial opportunity for improvement in gender equity in cancer research funding. POLICY SUMMARY: We recommend funders focus on publicly reporting and analyzing PI gender of funded research projects, reducing the "leaky pipeline" of female investigators in cancer research, and developing strategies to increase equity in review and evaluation processes.
Garton et al. (Tue,) studied this question.