The research leaders of the future are… men
The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) has made public their grants to the research leaders of the future (link in Swedish), aiming to help and promote young researchers with a lot of potential and ambition to build their own research groups within their fields. 18 persons got 10 million SEK each (roughly 1.5 million USD), and also a leadership education. However, SSF obviously believes that men are superior in building and leading research groups, as 14 of the researchers were men (that’s 78%).
It is often argued that the reason that men get more and larger grants than women [1] is that they are more abundant in academia and that the over-representation of men will solve itself given sufficient time. This makes the SSF decisions particularly saddening. These 18 researchers represent the future of Swedish research, and SSF thinks that the research of the future is better of being led by… men. Alarmingly, the foundation’s statements on gender equality (in Swedish) says that (my translation):
The foundation for strategic research views gender equality as something self-evident, that should permeate not only the operations of the foundation, but also all activities that the foundation supports. Thus, the foundation strives towards that all treatment should be gender neutral, and that the under-represented gender should be given priority when other merits are similar. In an equal nation, research resources of men and women should always be taken advantage of, within all areas.
Still, only 20% of the chosen researchers are women. You may think this is a one-time-only event, but no, no, no, it’s much worse than this. In 2005, six of 18 researchers chosen were women (33%), in 2002 six out of 23 (26%), and 2008 six of 20 (30%). It seems that the SSF regards equality to mean 70% men, 30% women. That’s pretty bad for a foundation says it “views gender equality as something self-evident, that should permeate not only the operations of the foundation, but only all activities that the foundation supports.” Obviously, the words on equality are just words, and women still have a long way to go before treated equally by foundations supporting research.
In the long run, this inequality only cements the established norm with men on the top of the research departments. Wennerås and Wold wrote in 2000 that “junior scientists’ frustration at the pace of their scientific productivity is normal at the beginning of their careers, when they do most of the benchwork by themselves. But female scientists tend to remain at this level their entire working lives” [2]. Maybe it would be a good idea for the directors of the SSF to read this, and think about what their actions actually mean for the future of strategic research, and contemplate why women are leaving academia to a much larger extent than men [3]. Because research funders has a huge responsibility for the future of the scientific community.
References
- Wennerås and Wold. Nepotism and sexism in peer-review. Nature (1997) vol. 387 (6631) pp. 341-3
- Wennerås and Wold. A chair of one’s own. Nature (2000) vol. 408 (6813) pp. 647
- Handelsman et al. Careers in science. More women in science. Science (2005) vol. 309 (5738) pp. 1190-1
About The Author
One of my readers asked me about the proportions of men and women that applied for this money. The statistics for that is available from SSF (http://web.ssf.3ddata.se/page.asp?goto=Utlysning.&eid=QHU9MiBGb25kSUQ9MTgw) and looks like this:
Female applicants: 59 (4 granted, 6%)
Male applicants: 100 (14 granted, 14%)
As can be seen, the females are 1) already underrepresented in academia, as shown by the 59/100 statistic, 2) granted funding less often than men (6%/14%). I would like SSF to explain how this helps equality in Swedish universities.
Further, even if the number of accepted grants were proportional to the number of applicants of each gender, my main point is still valid. The problem is that almost all research funding has this inequality built into it, with the argument being that more men than women apply. In addition, the above statistic showing that it is harder for women to get their applications granted, is almost always true (see eg. Wennerås & Wold 1997). My point is that a foundation aiming to shape the strategic future of Swedish research should think about the consequences its decisions lead to. Otherwise, women will always be under-represented at all higher university levels, and the under-representation will be used as an argument to uphold the under-representation itself. This leads to a vicious circle, where women are discriminated on the basis of previously being discriminated. And is that really what we want?
I really liked this post! Read it ages ago, but didn’t come around to comment. Terrible facts, but good that someone is talking about it!