Female scientists less likely to get research grants

In science, men still own the money. Between 2010-2012, thirty women did not get a research grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Reasearch because of gender discrimination. This number was established during a study by magazine PNAS.Psychologists Romy van der Lee and Naomi Ellemers calculated that women have a 14.9 percent change to get a grant for scientific research at NWO. For men, this percentage is set at 17.7 percent. The requests that NWO receives come from women 42 percent of the time, but this group receives 38 percent of the available grants, daily De Volkskrant writes.

The differences arise during the request evaluation from the selection committees. Members of those committees rate the qualities of female candidates lower than those of their male colleagues. The proposals from men and women are of the same quality. NWO is going to organize anti-sexism courses to tackle the problem. For this research, Van der Lee and Ellemers examined 2823 research proposals for a Veni grant, one of the grants NWO offers. The funding organization asked for this research, because the same differences are visible at a European level.

Researcher Van der Lee says that the solution to this problem is not to simply appoint more women to the committees. The research shows that this does not effect the number of women that get a grant. She said: “everybody has implicit prejudices, men as well as women”.

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