How Gender Bias Creeps Into Grant Making

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.

Dig Deeper

Even though applications written by women were disproportionately rejected, the researchers, using future grants as a proxy for success, found that the women who got Gates grants were more likely to get significantly more National Institutes of Health funding compared with the men Gates grantees.

While a federal grant doesn’t necessarily result in a breakthrough right away, it can lead to follow-on grants and more prestigious academic postings, the researchers posit. “It is likely that female innovators are systemically underfunded relative to the quality of their ideas,” they wrote.

Find it

“Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation” is a working paper by Julian Kolev of the Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, Fiona Murray of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and Yuly Fuentes-Medel, project manager of Fiber Technologies.