The money shows it is a man ’s world – how can we reduce the difference?

The “leaky pipeline” is a commonly used metaphor describing how there are fewer women at senior levels in academia, even when they dominate in certain subject areas at undergraduate level. For example, there are more female than male undergraduate medical students, and at the early-career researcher level of academia, the gender split is probably roughly even. There are, however, far fewer women than men in senior posts at universities in the UK. But there is also a “leaky funding pipeline”, with more funding going to men than to women. My own research has previously covered the amount of research funding awarded to male and female study leads across 6,000 studies related to infectious disease. However we split up the data (e.g. by laboratory science, public health research,HIV studies, research into malaria, or funding awarded per year), there was a consistent trend that around 75-80 per cent of the funding in each of these areas, and indeed the overall total, was awarded to male principal investigators. There is also a “leaky funding pipeline”, with more funding going to men than to women. There is no evidence of gender bias on the part of the funders here (and it’s not an aspect we assessed in our work). Evidence reported from the major UK funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, suggests that there is no significant difference in the proportions of successful grant applications led by male or female researchers. Thus, in this ci...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Ada Lovelace Day Gender bias science funding Source Type: blogs