Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Gender bias in science grant peer-review

As a nice complement to my previous post, the current issue of Nature reports on gender bias in the peer-review process for scientific grants. A Swiss research team led by Lutz Bornmann has conducted a meta-analysis of 21 studies on this subject, which shows that despite high variation between studies, overall there is a robust effect of gender and men have 7% better odds of grant success than women.

Possible causes and solutions are discussed both in the Nature article (subscription required) and in the original paper (open access).