Women and Peer Review: An audit of the Wellcome Trust's decision-making on grants

The Wellcome Trust has examined whether there is inadvertent sex discrimination in its grant-giving practices. The report of the audit, 'Women and Peer Review' summarises the study and its implications for women in biomedical science.

Women are markedly under-represented in senior scientific research positions, accounting for just 7 per cent of professorial-level staff in UK higher education institutes.

One possible reason for this imbalance is endemic sex discrimination within the scientific community, as exemplified by the recent analysis of the peer-review system of the Swedish Medical Research Council, which revealed that female applicants for postdoctoral fellowships had to be 2.5 times more productive than their male colleagues to get the same peer-review rating for scientific competence [Wennerås C, Wold A (1997) Nepotism and sexism in peer-review. Nature, 387: 341-343].

This study focused on two questions:

1. Are applications from women more likely to fail than applications from men?

2. Do women need to have a better publication record than men to win grants?

The Trust examined applications for project grants, programme grants and Senior Research Fellowships in Basic Biomedical Science, which represent the broad range of support provided by the Trust and are aimed at scientists at different stages in their careers.

The study revealed that women do not appear to be discriminated against in the Wellcome Trust's peer-review process: award rates are about the same for men and women, and the publication records of successful applicants are also similar.

Despite this, fewer women apply to the Trust for project or programme grants than would be expected given the number of female biomedical researchers (the number of women applying for Senior Research Fellowships in Basic Biomedical Science was about that expected).

Download 'Women and Peer Review: An audit of the Wellcome Trust's decision-making on grants' [PDF 1.6MB].

The Medical Research Council (MRC) has conducted a similar review of its activities. Details can be obtained from the MRC website.