IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bge/wpaper/1608.html

Gendered Topics and Grant Evaluations

Author

Listed:
  • Lídia Farré
  • Ha Luong
  • Judit Vall Castelló

Abstract

Are research proposals focusing on female-oriented topics evaluated differently? We examine this question using 4,291 successful and unsuccessful applications to a public research funding program in Catalonia. We employ structural topic modeling to construct a measure of the extent to which each proposal focuses on female-oriented topics. Using a reviewer fixed-effects model, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in this measure is associated with a 0.06-standard- deviation decrease in reviewer scores. The penalty is driven by male reviewers, who assign lower scores to male-led groups working on more female-oriented topics, while we find no significant penalty among female reviewers. Our findings document a new dimension of gender disparities in public research funding: the topics researchers study.

Suggested Citation

  • Lídia Farré & Ha Luong & Judit Vall Castelló, 2026. "Gendered Topics and Grant Evaluations," Working Papers 1608, Barcelona School of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bge:wpaper:1608
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/1608.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • O38 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Government Policy
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bge:wpaper:1608. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bruno Guallar (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bargses.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.