Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved August 19, 2015 (received for review May 26, 2015)
Women remain underrepresented in academia as they continue to face a leadership gap, salary gap, and funding gap. Closing the funding gap is of particular importance, because this may directly retain women in academia and foster the closing of other gaps. In this study, we examined the grant funding rates of a national full population of early career scientists. Our results reveal gender bias favoring male applicants over female applicants in the prioritization of their “quality of researcher” (but not “quality of proposal”) evaluations and success rates, as well as in the language use in instructional and evaluation materials. This work illuminates how and when the funding gap and the subsequent underrepresentation of women in academia are perpetuated.
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.
↵2Present address: Faculty of Social Sciences, Utrecht University, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Author contributions: R.v.d.L. and N.E. designed research; R.v.d.L. performed research; R.v.d.L. analyzed data; and R.v.d.L. and N.E. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
*External reviewing is conducted by international experts in the topic and field of the application proposal. Although these experts report their evaluation to the review committee, they are not considered members of the review committee.
†Scientists are allowed to apply twice within the first 3 y after obtaining their PhD. These data were available only for one call, that is, applicants who applied in 2012.
‡Applications were rated on a nine-point Likert scale ranging from 1, “excellent,” to 9, “unsuccessful.” Lower scores thus indicated more favorable evaluations and led to higher prioritization of applicants.
§Applications were evaluated twice by the interview committee, once before the interview and once after the interview. Because these two scores were highly correlated (r > 0.60, P < .001 for all), here we present the average interview evaluation.
**Applicants’ track record data were not available for analysis.
††We did not take into account the written communications containing explicit references to the NWO’s gender policy, resulting in 53 documents coded for gender-exclusive language use.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1510159112/-/DCSupplemental.
