Abstract
The well-known 1997 study of Wennerås and Wold on gender bias in grant allocation found a ‘male bonus’ of three Science papers: women would need three additional publications in Science to get a similar score for their competence as men. The paper has been cited many times but was also faced with criticism and with demands for reanalysis of the data of W&W. This study is an attempt to do so, and after field-normalizing the performance scores and panel-standardizing the review scores, we found partly different results. We also did find gender bias in the competence scores, but the male bonus we found is only one-fifth of the male bonus reported by Wennerås and Wold. The same holds for the ‘reviewer affiliation (or nepotism) bonus’ and for the ‘recommendation letter bonus’. We have expanded the original study by investigating whether there is any bias in the grant decisions, an issue not discussed by Wennerås and Wold, and apart from two panels, this does not appear to be the case. Here our findings are in line with more recent studies suggesting that gender bias in the panel scores not necessarily lead to gender bias in the grant allocation. However, the two panels where we identified bias in grant decisions accounted for a substantial share of the female applicants, suggesting that research into gender bias in grant allocation should be conducted at the panel level.
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Notes
As this is a reanalysis, we include performance in the analysis in the same way as W&W.
February 24, 2025.
After this paper was accepted, we were notified that Ulf Sandström and Ulla Riis recently published in Quantitative Science Studies another reanalysis of the Wennerås & Wold paper, after implementing corrections in the deployed dataset (online 11 Nov 2025, https://doi.org/10.1162/QSS.a.395). They arrive at different conclusions than we do because we use the original data we received from Sandström and also deployed a different analytical approach. We plan to reflect on the differences in a follow-up paper.
We use the term panel for the evaluation committee to which the application was assigned.
Science: Impact factor of 22, Nature: 25.
The grant belongs to the Swedish Medical Council.
We did the analysis also with the 116 applicants, and that did not change the findings.
SPSS27, generalized linear models (linear model and logistic model). As GLMs does not provide R2, the analyses were also done with linear and logistic regression to obtain the values for the (pseudo) R2.
Age was also found to be associated with grant success and career success in other studies (Van den Besselaar & Mom 2021a).
W&W did not use year of birth, but in another study on early career postdocs we found a significant effect of age: younger is better (Van den Besselaar et al., 2024).
In the specific year of the grant under study, there was an even bigger difference in success rates: 4 out of 52 women received the grant, leading to a success rate of less than 8%, whereas 16 out of 62 men received a grant, a success rate of almost 26%, which means that in the year under investigation the success rate of female scientists was less than a third of the success rate of their male counterparts. Sandström and Hällsten (2008, p.177) report that in the period 1989–2000, the success rates of men were about 5% to 10% higher than the success rates of women, which would mean that the in observed gap in 1994 of 18% was exceptionally high. However, the figure they present refers to the whole Swedish Medical Council, and not for the specific grant scheme under study by W&W. Table shows that the overall success rate for men at the SMC was about 50%, and the female success rate would be between 40 and 45%. In the grant scheme under study, the male and female success rates are 26% and 8% respectively. But with these lower numbers, a 5 to 10% difference would still be large.
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Acknowledgements
Part of the research underlying this paper was done in the context of the EC supported GRANteD Project (GA 824574) resulting in an earlier version of this paper (Van den Besselaar & Mom, 2023b). The authors thank the partners in the project for support and useful feedback, and Ulf Sandstrom for providing the dataset. We also gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions made by two reviewers on the previous version of the paper.
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van den Besselaar, P., Mom, C. Gender bias in panel scores and in grant success: reanalyzing ‘sexism and nepotism in peer review’ by Wennerås and Wold. Scientometrics 131, 389–411 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05532-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-025-05532-7
