THOUGH Sweden has been named by the
UN as the world leader in gender equality, women scientists of the country
have to be several times more productive than their male counterparts in
order to get equal scores while applying for research grants. Christine
Wenneras, a microbiologist, and Agnes
Wold, an immunologist, from Gothenburg University, came to the conclusion
that women scientists tend to be only
half as successful as men in the competition for postdoctoral fellowships at
Sweden's Medical Research Council.
The two researchers got access to
documents containing evaluation
scores only after a court battle and with
the aid of Sweden's freedom of information legislation. The scores are given
on the basis of the impact of a scientist's published work, which is measured by the number of times the work
is cited by other scientists in a year. The
documents revealed that for the 1995
batch of postdoctoral fellowships, the
peer review committees rated women
lower than men in the categories of
scientific competence, relevance of
proposals and the proposed methodology, even though they had the same
publication impact.
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