Gender Bias Impacts Top-Merited Candidates.

ABSTRACT: Expectations of fair competition underlie the assumption that academia is a meritocracy. However, bias may reinforce gender inequality in peer review processes, unfairly eliminating outstanding individuals. Here, we ask whether applicant gender biases peer review in a country top ranked for gender equality. We analyzed peer review assessments for recruitment grants at a Swedish medical university, Karolinska Institutet (KI), during four consecutive years (2014-2017) for Assistant Professor (n = 207) and Senior Researcher (n = 153). We derived a composite bibliometric score to quantify applicant productivity and compared this score with subjective external (non-KI) peer reviewer scores of applicants' merits to test their association for men and women, separately. To determine

SUBMITTER: Andersson ER 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8141636 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature