From next year, the National Health and Medical Research Council will give half of its investigator grants for mid-career and senior scientists to women and non-binary applicants.
The NHMRC has been working for a decade to address gender inequity in its grant funding. For example, in 2017, it introduced ‘structural priority funding’, which reserves additional money — around 8% of the overall grant budget — for high-quality ‘near-miss’ research applications led by women. This approach is also used to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers
But this did not address the gender imbalance among the most established researchers. In 2021, only 20% of the applicants in this group were women. Modelling suggested that even raising the priority-funding allocation to 20% of the grant budget for senior researchers did not achieve parity, says Anne Kelso, chief executive of the NHMRC.
The council will be looking to see whether awarding equal numbers of grants by gender leads to an increase in the number of senior women applying for leadership grants, says Kelso.The gender disparities in grant applicants and recipients among senior researchers reflect disparities in the STEM workforce, says Isabelle Kingsley, a research associate at the office of the Australian government’s Women in STEM Ambassador in Sydney.
For early-career researchers, the NHMRC will continue with existing gender-parity measures, such as structural priority funding. Kelso says there is significantly less gender imbalance among early-career researchers. From 2019-2021, more applications for investigator grants at the earliest career stage came from women — who were awarded 137 grants compared to 123 for men. “We found that we hardly needed to use any structural priority funding for the more junior levels,” she says.
Tony Kenna, president of the Australian Society for Medical Research in Brisbane, welcomes the changes, but hope this won’t be the final step. Other NHMRC grant schemes could benefit from similar reforms, he says, as could funding schemes offered by other agencies, such as the Australian Research Council.
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