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In an edition of the medical journal The Lancet entirely devoted to gender issues in the fields of health and science, the paper showed that the gap between the success rates of men and women in terms of grant acceptance accentuates when things become personal.
The experiment badyzed nearly 24,000 grant applications over five years at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the largest funder of public health research in Canada.
In 2014, the agency changed its application process by dividing the funding reviews into two separate systems, one focused explicitly on the applicant and the other on scientific badessment.
In doing so, they created a "unique natural experience", according to the authors of the study.
When badessments were based solely on the quality of science, the gender gap among accepted grants was only 0.9 percentage points.
But when the evaluations were based on an evaluation of the main scientists proposing the project, the gap between men's and women's acceptances reached 4%.
"This shows us that the science offered by men and women is evaluated as being of similar quality, but that men and women are not evaluated in the same way as scientists," said Associate Professor Holly Witteman. at the Department of Family and Emergency Medicine at Laval University, Quebec.
Witteman said that there could be several reasons for this, including individual or systemic biases.
Consciously or unconsciously, examiners may "tend to think that men are better scientists than women," she told AFP.
"Pure on merit"
The Friday edition of The Lancet also featured studies on badual harbadment in the scientific and medical fields and on how women are poorly represented in the research community, while they account for 75% health workers around the world.
"Something has gone wrong in global health," said Richard Horton, the newspaper's editor.
"The global health community has given up its responsibility for achieving gender justice in health."
Witteman said that despite some progress – including awarding women's Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry last year – science and medicine still had a long way to go to remedy their marked imbalances between men and women.
"I would like this to be resolved and resolved and so that we do not have to worry about biases preventing science from being evaluated and granting grants solely on merit", a- she declared.
"I think that awards should be awarded on merit and that merit should not be biased."
In October, Canadian scientist Donna Strickland became the third woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Twenty-four hours later, the American biochemist Frances Arnold received the Chemistry Award, the only fifth woman to receive this honor.
"Some people believe that there is no bias in the system, but when you look at it more closely, you often see that there is one", said Witteman.
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