In “Factors that Influence Career Choice Among Different Populations of Neuroscience Trainees,” published recently in eNeuro, NINDS program director Lauren Ullrich, Ph.D., and fellow authors bring to light many issues about why women and individuals from underrepresented populations leave the neuroscience field at rates higher than men and Whites. They are less often first authors of papers, publish in journals with lower impact factors, and less often submit grants through the “special,” more honorific mechanisms NIH has to offer.

For my birthday this past year, my husband bought me a book by Jill Lepore entitled These Truths – a nearly 1,000-page tome that tells the history of the United States, although describing it that way sells this wonderful book vastly short. What These Truths does is tell the complicated, messy, and intertwined stories of the people who collectively enacted and constituted the history of the United States. Like many, I read for pleasure only as I am falling off to sleep at night. This means it will be at least a few more months before I finish the book! But now, more than halfway through it, one thing is horrifyingly clear: slavery, persecution, hate crime, the advantage of assimilation and the deadly disadvantage of being identifiable as “other” have pervaded the history of this country since before its inception through the present day. To be sure, and somewhat reassuringly vis-à-vis the very humanity of the human race, outspoken and courageous opposition of people who viewed this to be wrong began almost as soon as the first enslaved person stepped on our shores. But too often, economics and xenophobia won out.