The truth about gender disparities in research funding

An analysis of over 20,000 grant applications reveals that gender gaps in research funding are caused by bias against women rather than the quality of their applications.

Across many studies and disciplines, findings consistently reveal that women researchers tend to receive less funding compared to men. Even when women contribute more to publications, they receive less credit. In previous studies it was difficult to determine whether the discrepancies arise from biases against women researchers themselves or from the evaluation of their research proposals. In this study, researchers analyzed grant applications to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to gain new insights into this question.

In 2014, CIHR created two streams of grant applications: one in which the excellence of the applicant was evaluated and one in which this was not part of the evaluation criteria. This made it possible to study the effect of potential bias against women researchers on the evaluation of grant applications.

Researchers examined 23,918 grant applications submitted between 2011 and 2016 to different grant programs run by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The study encompassed 7,093 principal investigators across different disciplines.

The overall success rate for grant applications was 15.8%. After controlling for factors such as age and research domain, the study revealed that women applicants had a lower predicted probability of success compared to their male counterparts. In traditional grant programs, the gender gap was 0.9 percentage points indicating a slight disadvantage for female researchers. In the two new streams introduced in 2014, for the stream where review criteria focused on the scientific quality of the proposed research, the gender gap persisted at the same magnitude. However, the most significant disparity emerged in the grant program that explicitly assessed the calibre of the principal investigator. In this program, the gender gap increased to 4.0 percentage points indicating a clear bias against women researchers when the assessment focused on the investigator.

The authors identified three main explanations for why women were evaluated less favourably than men: personal bias, structural biases such as articles acceptances rates, conference invitations and awards that unfairly favour men, and unfair grant evaluation criteria. They propose strategies to address these biases, such as anti-bias training, blind review, rethinking grant application review criteria, and more equitable support and resources for women researchers.

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Study Details

Sample size(s): 23918 grant applications from 7093 applicants (63% male applicants, 37% female applicants)

Participants: N/A

Design: Research Paper

Reference:

Witteman, H. O., Hendricks, M., Straus, S., & Tannenbaum, C. (2019). Are gender gaps due to evaluations of the applicant or the science? A natural experiment at a National Funding Agency. The Lancet, 393(10171), 531–540. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(18)32611-4

Summarized by WinSights team members: Khushi Sheth, Shohini Ghose, Mridhulaa Suresh, Asal Eshghabadi, Razan Mohamed