Mutz Rüdiger, Bornmann Lutz, Daniel Hans-Dieter
Professorship for Social Psychology and Research on Higher Education, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Z Psychol. 2012;220(2):121-129. doi: 10.1027/2151-2604/a000103.
One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of the peer review process is gender bias. In this study we evaluated the grant peer review process (external reviewers' ratings, and board of trustees' final decision: approval or no approval for funding) at the Austrian Science Fund with respect to gender. The data consisted of 8,496 research proposals (census) across all disciplines from 1999 to 2009, which were rated on a scale from 1 to 100 (poor to excellent) by 18,357 external reviewers in 23,977 reviews. In line with the current state of research, we found that the final decision was not associated with applicant's gender or with any correspondence between gender of applicants and reviewers. However, the decisions on the grant applications showed a robust female reviewer salience effect. The approval probability decreases (up to 10%), when there is parity or a majority of women in the group of reviewers. Our results confirm an overall gender null hypothesis for the peer review process of men's and women's grant applications in contrast to claims that women's grants are systematically downrated.
同行评审过程中最常被提及的批评之一是性别偏见。在本研究中，我们评估了奥地利科学基金的资助同行评审过程（外部评审员评分以及董事会的最终决定：批准或不批准资助）中的性别情况。数据包括1999年至2009年所有学科的8496份研究提案（普查数据），这些提案在23977次评审中由18357名外部评审员按照1至100分（从差到优）的等级进行评分。与当前的研究状况一致，我们发现最终决定与申请人的性别无关，也与申请人和评审员的性别匹配情况无关。然而，资助申请的决定显示出一种显著的女性评审员效应。当评审小组中女性人数相等或占多数时，批准概率会降低（高达10%）。我们的结果证实了在男性和女性资助申请的同行评审过程中总体上不存在性别差异的假设，这与关于女性资助申请被系统性压低评分的说法相反。
