Gender contributes to personal research funding success in The Netherlands

We examined the application and review materials of three calls (n=2,823) of a prestigious grant for personal research funding in a national full population of early career scientists awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Results showed evidence of gender bias in app...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 112; no. 40; p. 12349
Main Authors: van der Lee, Romy, Ellemers, Naomi
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 06.10.2015
Subjects:
Achievement
Awards and Prizes
Biological Science Disciplines - economics
Biomedical Research - economics
Biomedical Research - standards
Female
Humans
Male
Netherlands
Peer Review, Research - methods
Peer Review, Research - standards
Research Personnel - standards
Research Personnel - statistics & numerical data
Research Support as Topic - economics
Research Support as Topic - standards
Sex Factors
Social Sciences - economics
Netherlands
gender bias
research funding
success rates
academia
STEM
ISSN:1091-6490, 1091-6490
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:We examined the application and review materials of three calls (n=2,823) of a prestigious grant for personal research funding in a national full population of early career scientists awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Results showed evidence of gender bias in application evaluations and success rates, as well as in language use in instructions and evaluation sheets. Male applicants received significantly more competitive "quality of researcher" evaluations (but not "quality of proposal" evaluations) and had significantly higher application success rates than female applicants. Gender disparities were most prevalent in scientific disciplines with the highest number of applications and with equal gender distribution among the applicants (i.e., life sciences and social sciences). Moreover, content analyses of the instructional and evaluation materials revealed the use of gendered language favoring male applicants. Overall, our data reveal a 4% "loss" of women during the grant review procedure, and illustrate the perpetuation of the funding gap, which contributes to the underrepresentation of women in academia.
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ISSN:1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1510159112