Women’s chances of winning research funding are enhanced if they work in teams, and specifically teams headed by senior female academics, an Australian study has revealed.

Sydney researchers say their findings supply a missing piece of the gender inequity puzzle and suggest new strategies to improve female participation in science.

“Women’s grant leadership can play a crucial role in promoting gender equity, because they’re more likely to lead gender-balanced teams,” said study leader Isabelle Kingsley, a senior adviser with Science in Australia Gender Equity. “We can leverage that finding.”

The study,  in the journal Science and Public Policy, elaborates on a 2023 analysis that found that women’s low share of grant money reflected their modest numbers in the science workforce rather than reviewer bias.

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The team used a subset of the same dataset, more than 35,000 grants awarded by Australia’s two main research funding bodies between 2000 and 2020, to investigate whether collaboration patterns affected female researchers’ prospects of securing funding.

It found that men had attracted the bulk of funding awarded to both teams and researchers working alone. But among applicants at professor or associate professor level, women’s share of team grants was around 5 percentage points higher than their share of sole investigator grants.

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This was partly because teams headed by women contained more women. The study found that “gender homophily” – a tendency for people to associate with their own gender – was less pronounced among females than males.

“Women’s team grant leadership may be an important mechanism for shifting overall representation of women researchers in the sector,” the paper concludes. “This leadership could have broader implications in creating a positive ripple effect in the career pipeline.”

Dr Kingsley, who led the research while she was based at UNSW Sydney, said funders could emulate the Horizon Europe scheme in using gender balance as a criterion to choose between applicants with equivalent scores. They could also require institutions to submit equal numbers of women-led and men-led grant applications.

She said this would not prevent universities from submitting their very best research proposals, but might encourage more bids from first-time applicants.

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Dr Kingsley said sole investigator grants were a mark of prestige within universities, where individualists won kudos by securing windfalls on their own. She said the culture needed to be “flipped” to promote collaborative work that advanced the careers of more researchers, particularly women.

“Unis have a responsibility to kind of shape that narrative,” she said. “What is valued by the university is what’s going to matter to the researchers.”

The paper reports evidence that female researchers are generally more collaborative than their male peers. And while overall funding flows favoured men, the study found no gender skew in individual grant sizes.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com