Chiara Franzoni

Abstract

Recent studies indicate that the female penalty in the acquisition of research funding is not due to discrimination in the selection process, but rather to fewer applications submitted by female scholars. We investigate this supply-side issue by means of an original dataset comprising detailed information on both successful and unsuccessful applicants to 21 calls of a mission-oriented funding agency. We use this information to construct a fictitious pool of 283,515 potential applicants and to model the probability of submitting an application. We find that that women were 15.8% less likely to apply than men, net of seniority, productivity, quality and years of career discontinuity. We also find that the imbalance was not associated with the possible use of masculine language in the calls, while it was associated with the choice of topics/challenges. Women were engaged in research topics that were less proximal to the topics of the calls, compared to men. Moreover, topic proximity fully mediated the female penalty in the likelihood to apply. The results are an important heads-up, in view of the increasing interest of governments for mission-oriented programs.