Investigating Gender Bias Among Grant Applicants

Abstract

An ongoing debate in society is about the existence of a wage gap between genders, and society’s alleged preference to hire a man over an equally qualified woman. This debate extends from the commercial employment world into the funding of research grants. Given data collected at North Dakota State University between 2012 and 2018 have women who have sought federal funding for their research experienced a gender bias? To investigate, a logistic regression model is fit to determine whether gender affects funding probability. Other characteristics such as the primary investigator’s college, requested amount, and the research team’s make up of tenured and Caucasian members is also investigated. It was found that there is not a gender bias towards faculty at NDSU. Naturally, there was a bias towards researchers from different colleges and towards proposals requesting less funding. Surprisingly, a bias towards higher-proportion Caucasian research projects was found.