Who’s Backing an Effort to Ease the Career Versus Caregiving Conflict for Biomedical Researchers?

The pandemic has triggered serious new stresses throughout society, but it has just as often highlighted and exacerbated very old problems. One such problem is the collision of career and caregiving responsibilities for working people.

Getting ahead professionally often takes dedication and long hours. But what if you have to take care of young children, elderly parents or an ailing spouse? What if you’re an early-career faculty member at a biomedical research institution and your job involves teaching in the medical school, conducting research and running a lab, writing and publishing papers, and other departmental administrative services? Something’s gotta give, and often it’s career that suffers. This is especially true for women in the workforce, who still shoulder the bulk of caregiving burdens, whether of children, elders or significant others. And studies have shown this burden is even greater for women of color.

A new collaboration of funders, organized by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF), is betting that institutional buy-in can ensure that career and caregiving aren’t mutually exclusive.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which supports medical research in its grantmaking, has been working on this issue since 2015 with a fund focused on helping early-career physicians on medical school faculties handle their research responsibilities. But add in a couple of years of pandemic-catalyzed problems and the equation gets a lot more complicated, said Sindy Escobar-Alvarez, program director for medical research at DDCF.

Some researchers have quit academia altogether. That’s the kind of worst-case outcome DDCF and its partners are trying to prevent. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re talking about clinical researchers here, the kind of people who search for cures and therapies, develop vaccines for global disease threats, and the like. Society has a strong interest in keeping our clinical researchers thriving at work.

In response, DDCF has relaunched the researcher support initiative with a lot more money—and the additional firepower of five high-profile philanthropic partners—and recently announced the program’s first round of grants to U.S. medical schools. The goal of the grants is to encourage and reward leadership of medical schools and biomedical research institutions for efforts to address caregiving needs among staff.

The new program, called the COVID-19 Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists, recently announced its first round of funding: $12.1 million in grants to 22 medical schools. The money will support up to 250 early-career biomedical faculty who face additional caregiving needs, providing funds to help them keep their research on track by hiring additional clinical staff, or in other ways. Collaborating on the COVID-19 Fund to Retain Clinical Scientists are the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Rita Allen Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the American Heart Association and the Walder Foundation.

Although male researchers obviously have caregiving burdens, women are more likely to leave academic research as a result of such family considerations, said Escobar-Alvarez. “At the medical school level, we see parity in gender of the students, even slightly more women, but at the higher levels in research institutions there are many more men,” she said.

This is more than a matter of making life easier for busy young doctors and biomedical researchers. According to a survey from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, over 40% of young physicians with full-time faculty appointments at medical schools leave academia within 10 years. According to one estimate, it costs about $1.1 million to train a physician, and some of those costs are indirectly provided by federal tax dollars. That means medical schools and the biomedical research field risk losing the best young talent to this work-caregiving crunch, and the public loses some of the potential benefits of its investment.

The National Academies survey highlighted the needs of caregivers and helped spark the initiative, said Miquella Chavez Rose, program officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. “We invest so much in these researchers, it’s important to retain them. They’ve already shown they can accomplish so much—for them to have to drop out because of [caregiving needs] that happen to everybody, seems unwise.”

Throughout academia, and particularly in STEMM fields, people of color have long been underrepresented. Efforts to boost equity have made gains, but not quickly. This new fund to retain clinical scientists, the funders say, aims to support diversity in this not-fully diversified workforce.

Sam Gill, CEO and president of DDCF, hopes the program’s collaborative nature will deliver impact over and above the six funders’ contributions. “All of the foundations joining with us in this effort have been working to ensure that the biomedical sciences can be more equitable and inclusive,” he said. “As a collaboration, we can send a message to institutions that this is a real priority.”

The biomedical field obviously isn’t the only profession, inside or outside academia, where people must choose between work and family. It’s pretty much a universal challenge. While philanthropy has fewer tools to directly address these concerns in workplaces like for-profit companies, it may well have an important role to play as a voice for federal action that can ensure that family demands don’t put careers in jeopardy or prevent people from building the income and savings needed to bring about a more equitable society.

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