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@TIGERinSTEMM

10 Oct, 10 tweets, 3 min read

@EPSRC

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.

3. It has enough depth and detail to let us think about the WHY not just the what. Drawing out issues like low rates of application for new equipment funding from women immediately lets us discuss specific EPSRC policies which may be problematic.

4. It acknowledges the shortcomings of the analysis. Yes - we would really like to see reporting on this issue take a less narrow view of gender and embrace the non-binary, but at least the lack of data on this point is acknowledged in the report.

(Aside - that said - one thing which is not really acknowledged is the intersecting nature of discrimination faced by women who are BAME, disabled or LGBTQ+. We’d really like to see more on that in the future).

5. It doesn’t shy away from small numbers. At the top end of the spectrum - grants in the £10M - 200M range there are only a handful of women applying for or gaining awards, but the data on this is not suppressed. The small numbers are the story here.

6. There is at least the beginning of a plan to take action - a consultation has been launched to help try and understand the data in the report better. You can fill it in here:
surveymonkey.co.uk/r/KGN98VK

(Of course, we’d like to see a more concrete plan, but opening a dialogue with the community is at least a lot better than ignoring the problem, or simply wringing hands and saying “Oh my deary me”.)

@EPSRC

Overall, seeing this type of analysis from @EPSRC is a breath of fresh air. This type of work is needed across the @UKRI_news portfolio, and across all the different dimensions of inequity we see in STEMM - race, disability, LGBTQ+, socioeconomic status. More, please!!

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More from @tigerinstemm

@TIGERinSTEMM

@tigerinstemm

9 Oct

@EPSRC

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

@TIGERinSTEMM

@tigerinstemm

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

@TIGERinSTEMM

@tigerinstemm

8 Oct

@EPSRC

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.

Read 10 tweets

@TIGERinSTEMM

@tigerinstemm

7 Oct

@EPSRC

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:

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

@TIGERinSTEMM

@tigerinstemm

28 Aug

@carlafmfaria

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

@TIGERinSTEMM

@tigerinstemm

17 Jun

@tigerinstemm

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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