The @EPSRC report on gender and funding reveals that while women apply for smaller grants than men at every level, there are few clear patterns in what specific things they ask for less of, except for one point: women ask for less money for new equipment.
epsrc.ukri.org/files/aboutus/…
There’s been no investigation of the reasons for this yet, but we can make a hypothesis, based on one specific feature of the EPSRC application process: the EPSRC currently only fund 50% of most equipment requests, with Universities having to make up the other 50%.
Given we regularly see women complaining of institutional gatekeeping and a lack of university support for their applications, we hypothesise that getting the required commitment of Uni funding for 50% of a large piece of equipment is more difficult for women than men.
Women within TIGERS report that they either don’t succeed in obtaining such a commitment or have stopped bothering to even try.
Because equipment funding is difficult to access, women have to think round the problem, and find other ways to get their research done - e.g. accessing shared equipment, or building collaborations.
(That’s presumably made more difficult by the fact that women find it harder to build networks than men in a male dominated world - see for example work from @bestqualitycrab on the Australian research ecosystem: debverhoeven.com/australian-res…)
So when women get their grants, they have to work harder to get their research done, using the lower budgets available to them, whilst still stuck with more teaching, administration etc than men. This will have long term career impacts.
Of course this is only a hypothesis, and one which we hope will receive further investigation. Here’s a question for @EPSRC, arising from this hypothesis: Did the policy to only provide 50% funding for equipment undergo an equality impact assessment? If so, can we see a copy?
Do you have experience of applying for funding for equipment affected by this 50% rule? Do you think your race, gender or other protected characteristic affected your access to the required support? #TellTheTiger
(Also, here’s a reminder that if you want to help EPSRC understand these issues, you can fill in their survey here: Please give them the benefit of your experience, whatever your gender: surveymonkey.co.uk/r/KGN98VK )

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More from @tigerinstemm

10 Oct
Phew! It’s been quite a week discussing the @EPSRC report on gender & the grant portfolio. Before leaving this subject, we want to highlight how great it is to see a research council publishing detailed & granular analysis. Here’s what’s good about it! epsrc.ukri.org/files/aboutus/…
1. The EPSRC have taken responsibility for analysing the data, not just reporting it. This is in stark contrast to the UKRI data release earlier in the year - where there is a lot of information, but almost no analysis or reflection.
2. The report seeks to reveal where the problems are, not hide them. By reporting success rate by grant value not by grant number, it lets us see where women are missing out, and where interventions might be deployed to make a real difference.
Read 10 tweets
9 Oct
The @EPSRC report on gender in the funding portfolio tells us women are less likely to apply for grants across the board & are less likely to be successful when they apply for large grants. How will this impact women’s careers & the research ecosystem? epsrc.ukri.org/files/aboutus/…
We know that in research - just as in pretty much all else in life- success breeds success. This report gives evidence of systematic biases and barriers which will inevitably have a huge impact on the careers of women in science.
Research is the one key achievement needed to climb the Academic ladder, and lack of access to grant funding is keeping women out of senior roles. We need more visible women at the top of our profession if we are serious about tackling lack of representation.
Read 12 tweets
8 Oct
Another key finding of the report on the EPSRC funding portfolio and gender is that the salaries requested by men are higher than those requested by women, and this gets more marked with the age of the applicant. epsrc.ukri.org/files/aboutus/…
The report is not entirely clear on this point. We *think* it is referring to the salary rates which PI’s request for their own contribution to the research project. The numbers in the report include the pension and oncosts in these salary rates.
Assuming we’re interpreting this correctly, it’s important to realise that the salaries PIs request on their grants do not reflect any kind of self-evaluation. These are the salaries set by the Institutions who employ the PIs, who are paying men more than women of a similar age.
Read 7 tweets
7 Oct
The second key finding of the @EPSRC report on gender in the grant portfolio is basically that women have lower success rates than men when applying for high value grants. The chart of award rate by grant value range is so striking that we’re going to show it again here: Chart of success rate in EP...
In many ways, what’s striking here is not the lowish success rate for women applying for very large amounts of money, but the very high success rate for men.
For example the “Male AR by number” data tells us that roughly three quarters of men applying for >£10M get awarded the money they asked for. That compares to a typical ~30% success rate for lower grant values, with some recent responsive mode rounds having success rates <20%.
Read 15 tweets
28 Aug
Dear all, today I (@carlafmfaria) will take over, talk about myself & what I have learned on the way. I am a professor of physics at @UCL working on #attoscience, was born in the Amazon, & I am as mixed as it gets (ca 10 ethnic groups). Hope you enjoy it. Thread will come slowly
1) For those who don't know me, I am also an undercover Black Prof, lumped under “mixed other”. This has to do with not willing to wipe out mom’s Indigenous ancestry with a pen stroke. HR forms reflect British colonization and but my country was invaded by the Portuguese.
2) Being a pardo (Black person of Afro-European phenotype) is not a big deal in the Amazon, b/c we are 70% of the population (German husband is an attraction at the beach). My paleness puts me on top of the racial hierarchy, which shows you that race is a social construct.
Read 21 tweets
17 Jun
Today on @tigerinstemm we’re going to be talking about being an ally to trans colleagues. Our aim is to talk about some options in a way that is accessible to people who may not previously have thought about these issues. This thread will be added to throughout the day.
TIGERS members who are cis (i.e. whose gender identity conforms to their sex assigned at birth) try to be allies to our trans colleagues, who have been incredibly generous in educating us. This thread will explains some things we’ve learnt.
Many trans people change their names when they transition (begin to live according to their gender identity, rather than the sex they were assigned at birth). Some trans people refer to their previous names as “deadnames”. Calling them by these deadnames can be really hurtful.
Read 22 tweets

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