Gender Disparities in Scientific Funding: Do Women Ask for Smaller Grants?

Female scientists systematically receive lower funding, which has a large long-run impact on scientific success and impact. This paper attempts to understand whether this is because female scientists systematically ask for smaller grants compared to their male counterparts, conditional on the quality of the idea. I hope to combine analysis of grant application data to motivate an experiment to test this hypothesis. If there is a ‘gender ask gap’, I hope to explore what mechanisms underly this. Is it because of lower confidence in ideas? Is it information frictions in the grant application process? Is it because females tend to allocate their budgets differently to men?

Key facts

Principal Investigator: Kris Gulati
Email: [email protected]
Affiliation: PhD Candidate, UC Berkley Haas