When NIH is Weakened, Women in STEM Pay First

We often talk about the importance of getting more women into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). We tell girls and young women to dream bigger, work harder, and claim space at tables that were never built for them. Yet all of that rings hollow when support systems and opportunities become harder to rely on. 

For years, the conversation around women in STEM has focused on representation and mentorship. Those things matter, but are only part of the picture. Careers in science are built inside institutions, and when those institutions begin to weaken, women feel it quickly. What has happened at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has huge implications for scientific workforce integrity and the broader consequences of institutional instability.

NIH helps keep labs running, supports trainees and postdoctoral fellows, backs early-stage career scientists, and sustains the grant pathways that allow scientists to build independent careers. That gives it influence over the most vulnerable stages of a biomedical research career, where women are too often lost from the pipeline. NIH itself has acknowledged that women leave science at critical career stages, often when pregnancy, childbirth, caregiving responsibilities, and the pressure to move from training into stable, independent research careers converge. Its own data show that in 2025, women made up 40% of investigators receiving NIH research grants overall, but only 35% in the category of grants that often determines whether a scientist can establish an independent research career.

Under the Trump-Vance administration, pressure on an already fragile pipeline intensified. As NIH disruptions rippled outward, universities and research institutions pulled back. A recent analysis found that in 2025, NIH terminated 2,291 active grants totaling $2.45 billion. The fallout was immediate: hiring slowed, admissions narrowed, some programs reduced trainee intake, and training opportunities became harder to count on, leaving many early-career scientists in limbo. The damage did not fall on neutral ground. It hit a pipeline in which women were already more likely to be lost at key transition points, and when the cuts came, they absorbed a disproportionate share of the harm. Women lost a larger share of terminated grant funding than men on average, and among doctoral students and assistant professors whose grants were terminated, 60% were women-led.

For many women, this is how a scientific career unravels. Sometimes it is a single career-ending setback, more often it happens through accumulation: a delayed award, a vanished opportunity, a training path that narrows at exactly the wrong moment, a sense that the ground is no longer stable enough to build on. The cost sadly reaches well beyond the individual scientist - research loses talent and future leadership, the country loses people it has already invested in, younger women coming up behind them lose visible proof that there is a place for them here.

I have seen from inside government how scientific progress depends on public institutions that function. During my time working on the Biden Cancer Moonshot at the White House, I saw how much the path from discovery to public benefit depends on agencies like the NIH being able to support researchers, sustain scientific infrastructure, and move knowledge toward better treatments and outcomes.I also know it from my own path through science - my PhD training in biomedical sciences and my postdoctoral training in biomedical engineering were only made possible through government funding and support, and those opportunities helped open the path that eventually led me to the White House.

Women in STEM, and quite frankly the broader scientific workforce, need a research system they can build a future in. NIH exists so that science does not stop at discovery alone. Its role is to help move knowledge forward until it becomes something people can actually feel in their lives, whether that means better treatments, earlier diagnosis, or healthier communities. When instability pushes scientists out at the most vulnerable points in their careers, that mission is weakened too, and the damage reaches far beyond the lab. Over the next few months my fellowship through Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong initiative will focus on laying the groundwork for rebuilding scientific capacity and workforce and protecting and strengthening the institutions that make discovery possible. 

If you have ideas on reform, I encourage you to connect with us via the intake form here.

Catharine Young, PhD, is a Civil Service Defense and Innovation Fellow and former Assistant Director of Cancer Moonshot Policy and International Engagement at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy