European Research Council: excellence and leadership over time from a gender perspective

Abstract

European Research Council Grants (ERC) have become the most important vehicle for funding scientific research in the EU. Since their creation in 2007, they have provided funding for around 7,000 of the nearly 70,000 proposals for research projects submitted. With a success rate of about 11%, these Grants are highly competitive. Despite major advancement of women’s participation in research activity, women overall remain the minority in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM disciplines). Against that backdrop, this article analyses men’s and women’s presence in ERC Grants. The gender balance in the ERC Grant, have been examined in three dimensions: Excellence Awarded; Scientific Leadership Position; and Time Series Evolution. The results show that female presence is lower than men as submitted (26% vs 74%), granted (22% vs 78%), expert panel members (28% vs 72%), and as a panel chair (26% vs 74%). State-space prediction of the future pattern of these grants shows that time has no clearly beneficial effect on women’s participation as applicants, granted, expert panel members or panel chairs, particularly in the area of Physics and Engineering.

Determining factors of participation and success rates in research funding competitions: Case study

“…But, in the case of those who applied to over 6 competitions, the difference is significant in favour of men. These results confirm a part of our third hypothesis, and are in line with the results of other studies in the literature [15,23,24,29,30] that also point out that women apply less than men in research funding competitions.…”

“…Another issue is the idea that women apply less [15,23,24], and as a consequence, they succeed less often [15,16,[25][26][27]. Deriving from here is the fact that this could be one of the key causes for women having less successful scientific careers [28].…”

Is there gender bias in research grant success in social sciences?: Hong Kong as a case study

“…An analysis of research grants from the Wellcome Trust, a major funder in the UK, showed that fewer women applied for grants, and those were awarded received much smaller grants on average than did men during 2000 and 2008 (Bedi et al, 2012). Similar grant-seeking gender disparity was observed for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Foundation (Burns et al, 2019;Witteman et al, 2019a), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and NSF (Pohlhaus et al, 2011;Hechtman et al, 2018;Grogan, 2019), and across Europe (Watson and Hjorth, 2015;Bautista-Puig et al, 2019). For example, in Denmark, even taking into account of the "Younger women Devoted to a UNiversity career" (YDUN) research awards, male principal investigators on average still received a greater grant amount than their female colleagues (Watson and Hjorth, 2015).…”

Gender and other potential biases in peer review: cross-sectional analysis of 38 250 external peer review reports

“…Research Council Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants or Advanced Grants from 2007 to 2016 was consistently lower than the success rate of men. 9 Other factors than gender can influence peer review. A study of the Australian Research Council found that applicant-nominated reviewers tended to give better ratings than panel-nominated reviewers.…”

“… 8 Finally, the success rate of women applying for European Research Council Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants or Advanced Grants from 2007 to 2016 was consistently lower than the success rate of men. 9 …”