The Swedish Medical Council has drastically revised its criteria for awarding postdoctoral research positions after clear evidence of discrimination against women was published in the science journal, Nature, last year.
Ms Christine Wenneras, one of the authors of the report, said on average the size of the "male bonus" amounted to 20 extra scientific papers in good journals. Women had to be 2.6 times more prolific than men in order to achieve the same "scientific competency" score, she told the 400 delegates at the Women and Science conference in Brussels, last week.
Sixty-two men and 52 women applied for prestigious postdoctoral research positions in 1995. Of the 55 reviewers in the 11 evaluation committees, only five were women. The applicants' "scientific competency" was dependent on three features: scientific productivity (number of publications and prestige of the journals); gender; whether they were affiliated to one of the reviewers.
The process did not allow reviewers to actually review candidates with whom they were affiliated, but other reviewers tended to score candidates highly for this affiliation. Ms Wenneras said a rigorous statistical analysis was carried out to eliminate confounding factors. "Our results clearly demonstrate that male merits were overestimated and/or female merits were underestimated by the peer reviewers of a prestigious funding organisation in Europe. Although a surprise to some, our findings are in agreement with earlier studies within other fields," said Ms Wenneras.
The academic community has largely blamed the failure of women within academe on women themselves, she said, instead of investigating whether academic evaluation systems were fair and gender-balanced. The most popular explanation for the excessively high drop-off rate of women from the academic career ladder, is that they were hindered from doing first grade research because of family obligations.
"Our study revealed no statistically significant differences between male and female applicants in yearly productivity," she said.
The Swedish Medical Research Council has changed drastically in a period of two years, she said. A similar proportion of women as men were given grants. The council had set up quite strict guidelines as to how applicants are to be evaluated. as said her study was possible because of the Swedish Freedom of Information Act, which states that all documents held by state or municipal authorities should be accessible to the public." Most, if not all peer reviews had a strong penchant for secrecy. This policy of secrecy must be abandoned, she said.
The Swedish parliament has recently decided university faculties which fail to allot full professorships to women in proportion to the fraction of female researchers at associate professorial level, will receive reduced state funding.
"Naturally, this type of measure will give rise to strong opposition within the academic system, which for decades has silently accepted that vastly different career options exist for male and female researchers, respectively," said Ms Wenneras.