PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Holly O. Witteman
AU  - Michael Hendricks
AU  - Sharon Straus
AU  - Cara Tannenbaum
TI  - Female grant applicants are equally successful when peer reviewers assess the science, but not when they assess the scientist
AID  - 10.1101/232868
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 232868
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/22/232868.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/22/232868.full
AB  - Background Funding agencies around the world show gender gaps in grant success, with women often receiving less funding than men. However, these studies have been observational and some have not accounted for potential confounding variables, making it difficult to draw robust conclusions about whether gaps were due to bias or to other factors. In 2014, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) phased out traditional investigator-initiated programs and created a natural experiment by dividing all investigator-initiated funding into two new grant programs: one with and one without an explicit review focus on the caliber of the principal investigator. In this study, we aimed to determine whether these different grant programs had differing success rates among male and female applicants.Methods We analyzed results of 23,918 grant applications from 7,093 unique applicants in a 5-year natural experiment across all open, investigator-initiated CIHR grant programs in 2011 2016. Our primary outcome was whether or not each grant application was successful. We used Generalized Estimating Equations to account for multiple applications by the same applicant and an interaction term between each principal investigator’s self-reported sex and the grant program group to determine the extent to which gender gaps in health research grant funding differed by grant program. Because younger cohorts of investigators and fields such as health services research and population health have higher proportions of women, our analysis controlled for principal investigators’ ages and applications’ research domains.Results The overall grant success rate across all competitions was 15.8%. After adjusting for age and research domain, the predicted probability of funding success among male principal investigators’ applications in traditional programs was 0.9 percentage points higher than it was among female principal investigators (OR 0.934, 95% CI 0.854-1.022). In the new program in which review focused on the quality of the proposed science, the gap was 0.9% and not different from traditional programs (OR 0.998, 95% CI 0.794-1.229). In the new program with an explicit review focus on the caliber of the principal investigator, the gap was 4.0% (OR 0.705, 95% CI 0.519-0.960).Conclusions Avoiding bias in grant review is necessary to ensure the best research is funded, regardless of who proposes it. In this study, gender gaps in grant success rates were significantly larger when there was an explicit review focus on the principal investigator. Because of the quasi-experimental study design, these findings offer more conclusive evidence than was previously available about the causes of gender gaps in grant funding. Specifically, this study suggests that such gaps are attributable to differences in how women are assessed as principal investigators, not differences in the quality of science led by women.AbbreviationsCIHR: Canadian Institutes of Health Research