Programmatic Efforts at the National Institutes of Health to Promote and Support the Careers of Women in Biomedical Science.

Although women have reached parity at the training level in the biological sciences and medicine, they are still significantly underrepresented in the professoriate and in mid- and senior-level life science positions. Considerable effort has been devoted by individuals and organizations across science sectors to understanding this disparity and to developing interventions in support of women's career development. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) formed the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) in 1990 with the goals of supporting initiatives to improve women's health and providing opportunities and support for the recruitment, retention, reentry, and sustained advancement of women in biomedical careers. Here, the authors review several accomplishments and flagship activities initiated by the NIH and ORWH in support of women's career development during this time. These include programming to support researchers returning to the workforce after a period away (Research Supplements to Promote Reentry into Biomedical and Behavioral Research Careers), career development awards made through the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health program, and trans-NIH involvement and activities stemming from the NIH Working Group on Women in Biomedical Careers. These innovative programs have contributed to advancement of women by supporting the professional and personal needs of women in science. The authors discuss the unique opportunities that accompany NIH partnerships with the scientific community, and conclude with a summary of the impact of these programs on women in science.

Gender and venture capital decision-making: the effects of technical background and social capital on entrepreneurial evaluations.

Research on gender and workplace decision-making tends to address either supply-side disparities between men's and women's human and social capital, or demand-side differences in the status expectations of women and men workers. In addition, this work often relies on causal inferences drawn from empirical data collected on worker characteristics and their workplace outcomes. In this study, we demonstrate how tangible education and work history credentials - typically associated with supply-side characteristics - work in tandem with cultural beliefs about gender to influence the evaluative process that underlies venture capital decisions made in high-growth, high-tech entrepreneurship. Using an experimental design, we simulate funding decisions by venture capitalists (VCs) for men and women entrepreneurs that differ in technical background and the presence of important social ties. We demonstrate the presence of two distinct aspects of VCs' evaluation: that of the venture and that of the entrepreneur, and find that the gender of the entrepreneur influences evaluations most when the person, rather than the venture, is the target of evaluation. Technical background qualifications moderate the influence of gendered expectations, and women receive more of a payoff than men from having a close contact to the evaluating VC. We discuss the implications for future research on gender and work.