Securing money for research is hard for everyone – but then there's the sexism

Have you recently been denied promotion due to lack of research grant money? If so, join the club.

In my department last month two colleagues were turned down for promotion (one for reader and the other for senior lecturer) because, according to the university, they had not attracted "significant grant income". This is an all-too-familiar tale for those of us trying to progress.

Once, 4* publications were the holy grail; now we also have to attract research money, regardless of whether or not we actually need the cash to do our research.

Getting funding is harder for women

As anyone who has ever applied for research funding will know, getting research money is hard. Only 30% of applicants to major research councils are successful, making it a highly competitive process.

But a growing body of literature suggests that getting research funding may be additionally difficult for women, as the peer review process is rife with sexism.

Research published in 1997 first exposed the extent of this gender bias, when Wenneras and Wold revealed that the then Swedish Medical Research Council (MRC) consistently downgraded female postdoc applications.

Statistical analysis of data based on grades given to individual applications revealed that in the peer review process, women had to be two and a half times more productive than male applicants to receive the same competence score. In short, men were viewed as more competent by the assessors, and this had an impact on how they rated their applications, which ultimately resulted in increased success for applications from men.

In this case, sexism was compounded by nepotism – candidates connected to one of the judging panel scored even higher, something the researchers referred to as a "friendship bonus".

Having received 62 applications from men and 52 from women in 1995, the Swedish MRC awarded only four postdocs to women but 16 to men.

The problem of gender bias in applications subject to peer review (whether for grants or postdocs) starts early on. At the postdoc fellowship level, a study by Gannon et al revealed that when analysing postdoc fellowship scheme data, female applicants were on average 20% less successful than the males, and the research also discovered that for a woman to be successful she had to have published 7.1 papers, compared to the 5.8 expected of the men.

It is likely that this early discrimination plays a role in the fact that men have significantly better odds of receiving grants than women (7% according to a 2007 meta-analysis of 21 separate studies by Bornmann et al). Given the importance of research grant success in promotion and tenure, this gender bias also partly explains why, although women hold half of all bachelor degrees in Europe, only 10% of professors are women, and only 20% of Medical Research Council or Wellcome Trust grants end up in the pockets of female researchers.

There is something wrong with a system that consistently results in a lower success rate for female applications.

Competing for high stakes

Traditionally most of this research has been conducted in science and associated disciplines, where the stakes are high, and for a long time now, as Peter Higgs reminds us, research money has often meant tenure and promotion. However, as the power of research grant money becomes more apparent in other disciplines, this is an issue that should cause wider concern.

In the face of so much data about gender bias in peer review, the academy has to start taking this issue seriously, particularly if it intends to continue privileging research-grant capture (which relies on peer review) when promoting staff.

The heart of the problem seems to be the perceived competence of men, and the fact that women often have to work much harder to be seen as competent. This is also evident in peer review for journal publications. We know that when double-blind peer reviewing was introduced for academic journals, there was a significant increase in female-first-authored papers – a difference of 7.9% of female-first-authored papers, and a 33% increase in the representation of female authors more broadly.

Since 1997, research reports have been commissioned to investigate gender discrimination in higher education, and these reports have suggested that evidence is negligible. However, there is still substantial published evidence suggesting the contrary as well as the anecdotal experiences of female academics.

All too often I witness senior colleagues (often male simply because there are more of them) ride on the coat tails of junior academics' research because they are desperate to get their work in high-ranking journals or their name on a research bid – to satisfy their university's promotion criteria. The young researcher puts in the graft; the senior academic takes the praise. Research reveals that again the odds are stacked in favour of men, who routinely downgrade female skill and competence.

This leaves us with a problem that is somewhat intractable under the current regime of rewarding grant capture. One answer would be anonymous research grant applications. Some will argue, however, that such an approach is undesirable because grants take into account the prestige of the institution, its research environment and the track record of applicants themselves. Thus their identity is key.

This leaves us with one more option: a quota system. I suspect nobody really wants that, but it may be the only solution if the patriarchy won't play fair.

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