Women earn over half of college graduates in certain countries, yet they continue to be underrepresented in academia, where they face shortfalls in leadership positions, salary, and funding. Of these three issues, funding is particularly important: sufficient funding would make the other gender-based gaps easier to close. A new study in PNAS suggests that this issue isn’t going away, as committees making funding decisions are more likely to decide in favor of male applicants.

The study used data from the Netherlands, tracking early career researchers who had applied for a Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research grant between 2010 and 2012. Though women accounted for approximately 40 percent of the initial applicants, their success rates declined at every step in the review process.

During the time period in question, there were over 3,000 applications submitted, and 16.7 percent secured funding. However, the success rate for female applicants was only 14.9 percent, significantly lower than that of male applicants (17.7 percent).

Throughout the grant application review process, female applicants received less favorable evaluations than their male peers did. This happened even though there were no significant differences between male and female applicants when reviewers scored the “quality of proposal" and the “knowledge utilization.” Yet women were significantly less likely to be prioritized than men in the pre-selection recommendation process. Similarly, women received lower ratings in the “quality of researcher” category than men.

These differences in evaluations of applicants could not be attributed to gender imbalance in the review committee. Although all committees were approximately one-third female, the gender composition of individual committees were unrelated to applicant evaluations or success rates for male and female applicants.

The study also examined gender-based differences between scientific disciplines. The gender discrepancies were most pronounced in life sciences and social sciences. There were less clearly visible gender differences in certain fields, like physics and math. This may be attributed to the overall low number of applicants in these fields and the even lower number of female applicants in these fields.

(It also shows that there are differences between nations, as social sciences have reached gender parity in the UK.)

The most unusual item investigated by this study was use of gendered language. The researchers examined the documents provided by the funders, which described the grant application process and review procedures provided. These documents were coded for gendered language and references to a gender policy. The grant system’s gender-parity policy was widely disseminated. However, the written material included gender-exclusive language and gendered wording that favored male applicants over female applicants. The only time that gendered language favored women was in direct reference to the institution’s policy for gender parity.

So to sum up, female applicants for this funding are less likely to receive grants, gender disparities are apparent in committee evaluations of the applicants, and the language used in the reviewers’ instructions was favorable to male applicants. Disparities were most visible in fields where female applicants were more numerous, such as life sciences and social sciences.

The authors suggest that there are three ways that subtle biases could be enhanced by the evaluation process. First, in fields with higher number of applicants, it was harder for reviewers to completely process all available information and carefully weigh applicants, so they may have relied on heuristics that allow implicit biases to sway decisions. Second, the authors suggest that an emphasis on the gender parity policy may have misled reviewers into thinking that gender bias is no longer an issue that needs to be attended to when evaluating applicants. Finally, the authors posit that the use of masculine-gendered language in the reviewers’ instructions and evaluation sheets might have aided male applicants.

Though the data does not allow the authors to draw definitive conclusions about the overall effect of gendered language on outcomes, the findings are suggestive. Since there’s very little cost to switching to gender-neutral language in these documents, it’s worth testing to see if doing so creates a more equal playing field for both male and female applicants.

PNAS, 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1510159112 (About DOIs).

Editor's note: Readers have made us aware of criticisms of this study, summarized in a recent article in Science Insider. The criticisms appear to be two fold. One is that breaking out data into individual fields of research (such as physics or biology) eliminates the statistical significance of the overall result. This is not surprising, as smaller populations tend to be more prone to large statistical fluctuations.

A more significant criticism is the fact that women submitted more grants in fields that had a lower success rate for all applicants. This would necessarily lead to them having a lower success rate in the full population. This issue raises significant questions about the root cause of the lower success rate of female applicants.

It appears that the critics plan on submitting a formal critique to PNAS. We'll continue to watch for that, but publication of such critiques can sometimes take months.