Since 2012, women at the start of their academic career have received Veni research grants from the NWO (Dutch Research Council) research funder slightly more often than men. This was worked out by professors Casper Albers (University of Groningen), Sense Jan van der Molen (University of Leiden), and Thijs Bol (University of Amsterdam) in the scientific journal PLOS One.
In their article, the three authors suggest that there is now an ‘over correction’, after men initially had the advantage. A previous study showed that women received worse reviews from external experts who evaluated their applications, but that the NWO selection committee adjusted these evaluations in the grant distribution.
Co-author Casper Albers said that they only used public data in their research. “We thought it was important that NWO, now that it has more detailed information, looks into where the difference comes from.” The NWO announced that it will only respond when it has gone through the research thoroughly.
Statistics may be misleading
Albers says that these sort of statistics may be misleading. Even with these figures you cannot say with any certainty why women score slightly better than men, or whether the men lag behind only because they are men. There are also major differences between subject areas. But even after corrections are accounted for, women appear to have had an advantage since 2015 and this has increased over the years.
In the case of the Vidi and Vici grants that are awarded to academics at a later stage of their careers, the researchers did not see any clear differences in the success rates between men and women, although they say that this could be because the group is too small to see differences. What they do see is that the number of female applicants drops for grants awarded at later stages of careers. Of all the Veni applicants, 46% are women. In the case of the Vidi and Vici grants, this is 40% and 33% respectively. The researchers say that this shows that women still do not climb the academic career ladder as often as men.
The Veni grants were last awarded in August 2023. One hundred and eighty-eight young academics received a grant, of whom 88 were women. The remuneration percentage was 13% for men and 14% for women. Seventeen grants were awarded to researchers at TU Delft, including nine women.
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