Abstract
ObjectiveTo review the literature on strategies implemented or identified to prevent or reduce gender bias in peer review of research grants.MethodsStudies of any type of qualitative or quantitative design examining interventions to reduce or prevent gender bias during the peer review of health-related research grants were included. Electronic databases including MEDLINE, EMBASE, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), PsycINFO, Joanna Briggs, the Cochrane Library, Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) Reviews, and the Campbell Library were searched from 2005 to April 2016. A search for grey (i.e., difficult to locate or unpublished) literature was conducted and experts in the field were consulted to identify additional potentially relevant articles. Two individuals screened titles and abstracts, full-text articles, and abstracted data with discrepancies resolved by a third person consistently.ResultsAfter screening 5524 citations and 170 full-text articles, one article evaluating gender-blinding of grant applications using an uncontrolled before-after study design was included. In this study, 891 applications for long-term fellowships in 2006 were included and 47% of the applicants were women. These were scored by 13 peer reviewers (38% were women). The intervention included eliminating references to gender from the applications, letters of recommendations, and interview reports that were sent to the committee members for evaluation. The proportion of successful applications led by women did not change with gender-blinding, although the number of successful applications that were led by men increased slightly.ConclusionsThere is limited research on interventions to mitigate gender bias in the peer review of grants. Only one study was identified and no difference in the proportion of women who were successful in receiving grant funding was observed. Our results suggest that interventions to prevent gender bias should be adapted and tested in the context of grant peer review to determine if they will have an impact.
Highlights
Despite parity between the number of women and men completing undergraduate and graduate training in biomedical and health sciences worldwide [1, 2], women continue to be underrepresented as researchers in these domains and tend to receive less research funding than their male counterparts [3,4,5]
Our results suggest that interventions to prevent gender bias should be adapted and tested in the context of grant peer review to determine if they will have an impact
An analysis of health services and policy research funding in Canada over the past decade found that female researchers under the age of 45 years had significantly lower success rates than age-matched male researchers [6]
Summary
Despite parity between the number of women and men completing undergraduate and graduate training in biomedical and health sciences worldwide [1, 2], women continue to be underrepresented as researchers in these domains and tend to receive less research funding than their male counterparts [3,4,5]. A similar study of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States has shown that women received larger individual grant awards but men held more grants than women at any point in their careers [5]. It is unclear whether the discrepancy between the rate of successful male and female grant applicants is a sign of systemic bias. It is important to consider if there is unconscious gender bias in the grant peer review process because career advancement in academic settings is often contingent on the ability to obtain research funds. Forms of unconscious bias include gender bias, racial bias, and ageism, with gender bias representing one of the most frequently investigated biases associated with grant peer review [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
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