Summary

Billions of pounds are spent on research every year but we don’t know whether it is being spent in the most effective way. Despite the importance of diversity, inequalities persist in research funding success by gender and scientific field.

The best way to discover whether problems and inequities exist in the way in which research funding is allocated – and what causes them – is to gather and analyse data about the funding landscape.

As a pilot project using RoRI’s Funder Data Platform, the CRITERIA project explored who receives research funding and how these decisions are made, to understand if and how inequalities arise, and how funding processes to change to realise the full potential of people and research.

Project team

Vincent Traag, CWTS-Leiden and Senior Research Fellow, RoRI

Partner organisations

• Australian Research Council (ARC),
• Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR),
• Dutch Research Council (NWO),
• Michael Smith Health Research BC,
• Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF),
• Research Council Norway (RCN),
• United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI),
• Wellcome Trust

The project in detail

Gender differences remain observed throughout academia (Larivière et al., 2013). In most disciplines, there are more male than female authors active (Boekhout et al., 2021; West et al., 2013), and women experience author disputes more often (Ni et al., 2021). In higher academic ranks, we typically observe more men than women, even though the gender balance at the student level may be more balanced (Dutch Network of Women Professors, 2021). There is a productivity difference between men and women authors (van Arensbergen et al., 2012), and a difference in citations (Dworkin et al., 2020) and self-citations (King et al., 2017), although these differences may be the result of productivity differences (Huang et al., 2020; Mishra et al., 2018) or of journal prestige (Andersen et al., 2019).

It is not always clear how such gender differences arise. For example, recent results suggest that there is no gender bias in peer review at journals (Squazzoni et al., 2021), so that gender bias in peer review does not seem to explain gender differences in productivity. Some literature finds that double-blind reviewing increases representation of women (Budden et al., 2008), although other experimental research with double-blind reviewing reveals no gender difference (Blank, 1991; Tomkins et al., 2017).

Similarly, there are gender differences observed in research funding (Meulders et al., 2010). Again the question is how these differences arise. In particular, the causal mechanism often remains unclear (Cruz-Castro & Sanz-Menéndez, 2020), and more generally causal questions arise in defining gender bias (Traag & Waltman, 2020). Funding is an important factor in advancing a career (Bloch et al., 2014), and gender differences in funding may result in gender differences in academic careers. Funders aim to select grant proposals most likely to meet their objectives. Funders are aware of and increasingly recognise the importance of funding a diversity of individuals and approaches. In this project we look at gender differences in research funding, and will present results of a multi-funder analysis of funding outcomes.

The aim of the CRITERIA project is to study how grant evaluation criteria affect gender differences. Previously, it was observed that the criteria that are used to evaluate grant applications may affect the gender differences in funding (Witteman et al., 2019). Each programme in our study uses different selection processes in different contexts. This allows us to compare gender differences in funding rates across programs, and hence, across criteria.

Project timeline

This project runs until September 2025

Outputs

This project will produce a working paper detailing full results, as well as additional use-oriented outputs (tbc).