Who gets the grant money? In an article by Meredith Somers for MIT Management, she cites that female scientists are 16% less likely than men to get a high score on their grant proposal due to word choice. And "that needs to change".
According to a research found in MIT's new working paper, "Is blinded review enough? How gender outcomes arise even under anonymous evaluation," women used "narrower" words that are "highly concentrated in a small number of topics."
The male grant applicants are likely to use "broad" words, which "appear at similar rates in all topic areas," the study reported.
The study's results found that a "significant reduction" in how reviewers perceive the quality of the women's proposals. Even when those proposals are written in high quality.
If there is one thing for female applicants to take from the research, the co-authors write that repeat applicants earned higher scores than their first proposals, suggesting "the value of persistence in the face of rejection."
A customized collection of grant news from foundations and the federal government from around the Web.
Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.