Gender, Excellence and Academic Research Funding : A quantitative study of the relationship between gender and excellence in Norwegian research funding programmes

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between excellence and gender in academic research funding. Previous research conducted in Scandinavia has shown that excellence efforts might be damaging for gender equality. I reassess this hypothesis by comparing the application behaviour and successfulness in obtaining research funding of women and men across two highly competitive funding schemes in Norway: one that explicitly stresses excellence in the programme title (the Centre of Excellence programme) and one that does not (the Independent Projects programme). Grounded in organisation theory, I hypothesis that organisational factors, such as organisational learning cumulating over time affects how men and women respond to organisational stimuli, such as excellence. My main findings suggest women are generally less likely to apply as centre leaders in the Centre of Excellence scheme, even when adjusting for the composition of the pool of potential applicants based on researchers’ academic rank. However, women are as likely as men to apply in more recent calls (given the number of potential applicants). Comparing success rates for men and women, the results show that women outperform men in both funding programmes, but this difference is generally substantially larger in the Centre of Excellence scheme. This implies that there may be a self-selection effect at play among women when stressing excellence in research funding. However, after conducting logistic regression, there seem to be no statistically significant covariation between gender and being granted or not.