Women more likely to win Veni grants than men
The difference is small, but at the beginning of their scientific careers, women are more likely to receive a grant from research financier NWO than men, according to three professors.
Scientists who have recently received their PhDs can apply for a so-called Veni grant from research financier NWO. They then receive a maximum of €320,000 to conduct research as they see fit. For many, the grant is an important step in their career.
But by no means does everyone receive this money. It is preceded by a selection process. In this, women now stand a better chance than men, professors Casper Albers (Groningen), Sense Jan van der Molen (Leiden) and Thijs Bol (University of Amsterdam) have calculated.
NWO has taken steps to increase the success of women in science. Perhaps this policy was too successful for Veni grants, Albers writes on the social media platform Mastodon.
In their article, the authors warn against hasty conclusions. With these figures in hand, you cannot say with certainty why women score slightly better than men. Nor can you simply say that men are at a disadvantage just because they are men.
Overcorrection
But the three authors do suggest that there has been “overcorrection,” after men first had a slight advantage. An earlier study showed that women receive worse reviews from outside experts who evaluate their applications, but that NWO selection committees adjust those reviews in the final distribution. Perhaps they overshoot in that, the article speculates.
“We only used public data,” Albers says in a comment. “It seems very important to us that NWO should now, with more detailed information, find out where the difference comes from.”
This kind of statistic is full of pitfalls, he says. For example, you can’t lump all men and women together. In physics and chemistry, male applicants are more likely, and more men work in those fields. In psychology, the rate of remuneration is lower, and more women work in that field. “We tried to eliminate such differences as best we could,” says Albers.
So”a difference still remains visible, although it is not very large. It is about a 15 versus 13 percent chance of getting a Veni grant. "An excellent proposal gets through and a lousy proposal gets rejected, from both women and men,” Albers says.
Superiority
You can work well with data on men and women, while other forms of diversity (such as ethnicity or disability) are not readily visible. Albers remarks: “But if you think about ways to make the system fairer, hopefully this will help others." If you give women more time to apply after pregnancy, the obvious thing would be to do the same for other forms of force majeure, such as care leave or illness.
NWO cannot yet comment, a spokesperson said. “We hadn’t seen the study until today. So we obviously want to read it carefully before giving a substantive response.”
The Veni grants are followed by the Vidi and Vici grants. In these, the researchers saw no clear differences in success rates between men and women, although that may be because that group is too small to detect any differences.
Yet a scientific career still seems more difficult for women than for men. Of all Veni applicants, 46 percent are women. For Vidi and Vici grants, the numbers are 40 and 33 percent, respectively.
