Studies: Female Scientists Receive Less Credit and Less Funding for Their Work

Having recently celebrated the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we must not forget the female scientists that aren’t always in the spotlight – or more specifically, those that don’t get credit for their work.

A new study by Rori Rohlfs and Emilia Huerta-Sánchez revealed the hidden contributions of women to the field of theoretical population genetics, a field that is typically dominated by men.

In most scientific papers, the members of the team conducting the research are cited in the author list, which appears on the front page. The acknowledgement section often comes at the end of the paper, listing out the names of people who played a minor role in assisting with the publication.

Rohlfs and Huerta-Sánchez, from San Francisco State University and Brown University, respectively, sifted through 30 years of research articles published in the journal Theoretical Population Biology, searching for where the names of female computer programmers appeared: in the acknowledgements section or in the author list.

Of the 883 papers included in the study, dating from 1970-1990, they found that female programmers appeared in the acknowledgements section 43.2 percent of the time and in the author list 7.4 percent of the time.

These numbers are somewhat surprising, considering computer programming and drafting statistical models can be a critical part of a paper in this field.

“Some of these programmers were doing really creative work and making substantial contributions…work that today would likely qualify them for authorship,” said Rohlfs in a San Francisco State University news release.

Authorship is an important part of a scientist’s career. A scientist’s credibility is partly dependent on his or her publication track record – the more authored papers, the better. Authorship shows reviewers and funding agencies that this scientist is an expert in the field, thus their proposed research will have a higher chance of being funded.

Over time, fewer female programmers appeared in the acknowledgements section, in parallel with the shift of this responsibility over to students and research associates. Today, the gender gap is particularly salient in quantitative fields like computing, programming, mathematical modelling.

Members of the scientific community are well aware of the gender gap, although they are slow to close it. According to new research published in The Lancet, female scientists continue to be at a disadvantage when it comes to research funding.

The study was launched by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), a major funding agency for health and medical research in Canada, known for competitive funding programs and support of leading scientists. They compared two different review processes, one that only evaluated scientific merit of a research proposal and one that evaluated scientific merit and researcher competence.

After a team evaluated nearly 24,000 successful grant applications from 2011-2016, they found that fewer female scientists received funding when their research competence was also being considered, despite proposing research with equal scientific merit as their male counterparts.

This discrepancy might stem from individual reviewer biases as well as systemic biases that perpetuate the success of male scientists over female scientists. For example, if reviewers look at a scientist’s publication track record, they might see that male scientists have stronger CVs and more first-author papers in high-impact journals compared to female scientists, resulting in a higher chance of success at receiving subsequent funding. This vicious cycle constantly rewards male scientists and prevents female scientists from advancing their research and careers.

“You need the grants in order to be able to do the work, to publish the papers, to get invited to give the talks,” said Holly Witteman, lead author of the study, to The Globe and Mail.

The journey to eliminate gender bias in science and medicine won’t be easy but begins with awareness and advocacy. According to Adrian Mota, associate vice president of research programs at CIHR, the agency now requires reviewers of this grant competition to complete a training module on implicit bias. Additionally, Dr. Witteman and her colleagues stress that reviewers should “focus assessment on the science, not the scientist”.

From the work on authorship, it is clear that the rules for accreditation should be revised. Although the study focused on work published more than two decades ago, it is possible that the contributions of women continue to be overshadowed by the contributions of men. Despite this, some women, who were repeatedly mentioned in the acknowledgements section of seminal papers, went on to flourish in their scientific careers.

Equity and inclusivity are major themes in society, let alone the science and technology industry. With more females taking leadership positions at big companies and more portrayals of women in scientific roles in media, we are beginning to see changes in industry practices across all disciplines.