Men awarded NSERC funding grants more often than women — and it’s not because of language use

Despite major advances, women in STEM fields continue to face obstacles that hinder their careers and limit the capacity for discovery in science. We investigated whether success in obtaining research funding represents one such obstacle in Canada.

Using public summaries from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Individual Discovery Grant competition in 2016, we sought to determine whether men and women differed in grant funding levels, correcting for scientific field and career stage, and whether these differences could be attributed to differences in word usage. To do so, we inferred gender based on each researcher’s name and inferred career stage based on their past history of NSERC funding.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

We found that women received approximately 5% smaller grants ($1756 less per year, a marginally significant difference), accounting for subfield and career stage. For scientists early in their career, being denied funding is a particularly large obstacle. Based on data collected by NSERC for grants between 2012 and 2018, we found that female early-career researchers were much more likely to have their grant rejected (40.4% of the time) than men (33.0% of the time), a highly significant difference.

We then investigated whether language use in scientific writing was correlated with gender, hypothesizing that differences in tone might reinforce gender biases. While word use in public grant summaries did differ between men and women, the differences were slight and did not predict differences in funding levels.

The linguistic variable that explained the most gender variation was “conjunction”, which may reflect a difference in narrative style between men and women. The linguistic variable most associated with career stage was “tentative”, with increasingly tentative language used by more senior scientists. Neither of these variables was, however, associated with funding level. Thus, at least in the public summaries written by scientists submitting grants, we fail to account for differences in grant funding according to gendered differences in word choice.

Our results indicate that gender equity has not been achieved in Canadian tenure-track STEM fields, warranting further investigation, particularly into the lower success rates and funding levels of women early in their research careers.

Read the full paper — Gender and language use in scientific grant writing by Mackenzie Urquhart-Cronish and Sarah P. Otto.