Science Funding

My last blog gave reasons why women might be at a psychological disadvantage when applying for scientific grants. I didn’t have any evidence that they were disproportionately unsuccessful, it just seemed likely from my observations.

Yesterday’s Guardian confirmed that in 2016-17 women were principal investigators on 7% of grants awarded by EPSRC, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the average amount awarded to women was less than 40% that awarded to men. This came out following a Freedom of Information request from Michaela Kendall, whose experiences ring some alarm bells:

In 2017 she applied for seven government science grants from the EPSRC, Innovate UK and Local Enterprise Partnership. All seven proposals were rejected though highly scored. Her father, Prof Kevin Kendall, made one proposal based on the same business case and that proposal was accepted.

I should admit a personal stake in this argument: I left UCL after failing to establish myself as an independent researcher due to a series of unsuccessful grant applications. Some were highly rated by the peer reviewers, but the funding panels still said no. The final straw was when a senior male colleague was rejected in the same round as me: he contested the decision and was awarded the money after all. As a young female postdoc, it felt like that option was not open to me.

To some extent it may be fair for funding councils to take into account the personal track record of a scientist not only the proposed programme of work itself. A high-profile full professor probably has a better chance of delivering an ambitious piece of research than a more junior colleague. And yet… if one wanted to design a glass ceiling this is exactly how to do it: anonymous funding panels with no challenge to any unconscious bias they might have.

Science, gender, and transgressive personality

My theme this week is transgressive personality and how it relates to success in science and other fields. When I googled ‘transgressive personality’, revealingly the vast majority of hits were about Donald Trump. The consensus seems to be that his transgressiveness is a large part of his appeal to supporters. Although the instances may be vanishingly rare where his behaviour is truly helpful in breaking through convention and telling it like it is (usually he is just being a jerk), still, people respond to a renegade.

So do scientific funding panels. Nobody wants to finance work which builds slowly and incrementally on previous investigations. They want to fund the next Einstein. They want a bold new direction, even if 99% of the time it leads nowhere. In many ways that is fair enough, and clever scientists know how to sell their research as a blend of high-risk high-impact work and more incremental advances they can actually deliver.

However, I think women often have a hard time in adopting this approach, because we are raised to be more cautious than men. Reshma Saujani makes a lot of good points in her TED talk about how boys are taught to be brave while girls are taught to be perfect:   https://www.ted.com/talks/reshma_saujani_teach_girls_bravery_not_perfection

But childhood conditioning isn’t the end of the story. There can also be differences in how employers react toward transgression when it comes from a man or a woman. In my institute, people who are not in academic posts are not supposed to apply for grants. A woman broke this rule, and all the academics were up in arms about how pushy she was, how she was trying to establish herself as a group leader by default. A man broke the same rule and they reacted by saying, well done.

We don’t only need to teach girls to be more ambitious, take more risks and break more rules, we also need to teach society not to punish them for doing it.