Gender Gaps in the Chilean Young Investigator Grant and the Potential Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns in 2020

Abstract

Gender gaps are a problem in science, impeding the advancement of women. While some progress has been made in recent years, the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 could aggravate the gender gap even more, with female researchers taking on more responsibilities of care work and domestic labor than men while working from home. The present study analyzed the number of proposals submitted by women to the Chilean Young Investigator Grant (Fondecyt de Iniciación en Investigación) competition 2020, whose application period closed four weeks after the start of the lockdown in Chile. Compared to the years from 2010-2019, in which 35.6% of all proposals were submitted by women, in 2020 this percentage was 38.5%, and thus higher than usual. Women’s success rate in 2020 was 4.1 percentage points lower than that of male applicants, compared to an average gap of 2.3 percentage points in previous years, despite the implementation of a partly double-blind evaluation procedure in 2020. This might suggest that some of the women who submitted a proposal may have sent a non-finished or non-polished version, thereby increasing the likelihood of rejection, or that there was gender bias in evaluation. While the total share of female applicants increased in 2020, there was a decrease of applicants under 40 years, which may indicate that women with small children applied less than usual. These findings complement other evidence showing that the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 could aggravate the existing gender gap in science, but that the picture is more complex than previously assumed.

Sustained knowledge work and thinking time amongst academics: gender and working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Studies on gender differences among academics during COVID-19 have found that women academics perceive more negative outcomes than their male colleagues. Early studies found gendered discrepancies in the proportions of journal submissions (Andersen et al 2020;Squazzoni et al 2020), preregistration andpreprint (Vincent-Lamarre et al 2020), and in grant applications (Garrido-Vásquez et al 2020) across several disciplines (Oleschuk 2020). Women academics reported decreases in first author submissions, and co-authored article submissions from two months prior to stay-at-home orders to two months into these orders (Krukowski et al 2021).…”

Was This Supposed to Be on the Test? Academic Leadership, Gender and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Denmark, Hungary, Romania, and United Kingdom

“…It is important to point out that increased gender disparity in research productivity as a result of pandemic rules and switching to online teaching is not a phenomenon restricted to Europe and North America. There are a plethora of studies showing similar results globally, including Brazil [41], Mexico [42], South Africa [43], Pakistan [44], Turkey [45], Chile [46], West African countries [47], and Australia [48] to give only a handful of examples.…”