Abstract
Women in science, technology, engineering, and math are not equally represented across tenure-track career stages, and this extends to grant funding, where women applicants often have lower success rates compared with men. While gender bias in reviewers has been documented, it is currently unknown whether written language in grant applications varies predictably with gender to elicit bias against women. Here we analyse the text of ∼2000 public research summaries from the 2016 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) individual Discovery Grant (DG) program. We explore the relationship between language variables, inferred gender and career stage, and funding levels. We also analyse aggregated data from the 2012–2018 NSERC DG competitions to determine whether gender impacted the probability of receiving a grant for early-career researchers. We document a marginally significant gender difference in funding levels for successful grants, with women receiving $1756 less than men, and a large and significant difference in rejection rates among early-career applicants (women: 40.4% rejection; men: 33.0% rejection rate). Language variables had little ability to predict gender or funding level using predictive modelling. Our results indicate that NSERC funding levels and success rates differ between men and women, but we find no evidence that gendered language use affected funding outcomes.
Highlights
Women in science face additional barriers to success that are rooted in historical biases (Wellenreuther and Otto 2016), which remain widespread despite over a decade of policies aimed at increasing female participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields (Larivière et al 2013)
Our results indicate that Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) funding levels and success rates differ between men and women, but we find no evidence that gendered language use affected funding outcomes
This estimate is substantially higher than the 15.0% of awardees reported to be ECRs (Table 1), a similar fraction of awardees were “Established Researchers Not Holding a Grant”, who would contribute to the number of awardees receiving a Discovery Grant (DG) for the first time
Summary
Women in science face additional barriers to success that are rooted in historical biases (Wellenreuther and Otto 2016), which remain widespread despite over a decade of policies aimed at increasing female participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields (Larivière et al 2013). A meta-analysis conducted by Bornmann et al (2007) reported that among grant applicants, men had 7% greater odds of being awarded funding than women These gender differences in funding success could be related to various factors affecting the grant review process, including structural biases related to how academic scientific institutions function (e.g., there are more men in decision-making roles); gender biases (Kaatz et al 2014), either explicit (e.g., conscious bias) or implicit (e.g., unconscious bias); and (or) differences in field, career, stage, or scientific productivity (e.g., Symonds et al (2006) found that women had fewer papers early in their careers, but publication trajectories rose at a similar rate per year and citations per paper were higher for women). We set out to determine whether gender differences in scientific funding exist in Canada and whether language use in scientific grant proposals is associated with gender and funding level
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
