Black scientists won't stay in Canada without equitable research funding, experts say

The system for granting federal research funding in Canada fails to give Black scientists the support they need to optimize their work, professors and researchers say.

Not providing that stability for researchers may result in a brain drain to other countries, says Lawrence Goodridge, who has worked in the U.S. and Canada.

Goodridge holds the Leung Family Professorship in Food Safety at the University of Guelph and is director of the school's Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety. He said historical bias has negatively impacted racialized populations and women researchers in the STEMM fields — science, technology, engineering, math and medicine.

He said one common criteria for determining who gets grant funding in Canada is if a candidate demonstrates leadership or has received grants before.

"The problem is that women and racialized populations generally have not had those … leadership opportunities and they're less likely to be perceived as leaders," he said in an interview on CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition. "This therefore affects their grant success."

Carl James, a professor at York University in Toronto and the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora, agrees that different life and work experiences from Black and other racialized researchers don't always get the recognition they should by people who review grant applications.

"If you believe that the research is enhanced by the diversity of the people who are doing it, the entire society benefits, because of the diversity, because of the richness of the information that we're getting," he said. 

Juliet Daniel is a cancer biologist, and associate dean of research and external relations in the faculty of science at McMaster University in Hamilton. 

She recalls one application she put forward in the early 2000s for research into how breast cancer appeared to disproportionately affect Black women. One reviewer commented that her research was "not relevant to the Canadian context."

"Oh, excuse me, but we have Black people here," Daniel recalled thinking about the comment. She received the funding the third time she applied.

Loydie Jerome-Majewska is an associate professor in the pediatrics department at McGill University in Montreal who studies developmental genetics and specifically malformations in newborns. She said she's had luck with grant funding when she's listed as a collaborator. 

But when her name is on the application as principal investigator, "even though the grants may be ranked really high, they don't get funded."

She said she's received scores of 4.6 out of five on grant applications and has been denied the money.

Jerome-Majewska said she doesn't believe she's been denied funding because she's Black, but the inability to get the money she needs has been discouraging.