The Theory
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wanted to find out whether a double-blind grant-making process was effective at weeding out gender bias when evaluating grant applications.
The Test
Researchers studied the foundation’s Global Challenges: Exploration program. A diverse pool of independent reviewers had screened applications for grants without access to information about who submitted them. The researchers studied 6,794 grant proposals made from 2008 to 2017.
The Results
Using Gates’s rating system, researchers found that women applicants were 15 percent less likely than men to receive a “silver” rating and 20 percent less likely to receive a “gold” rating from the reviewers. The researchers said a big reason was that the men tended to use “broad” words to describe the sweep of their work, while women researchers stuck close to “topic-specific” vocabulary to describe how their work would advance causes like agriculture, nutrition, and disease research.
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