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Britain's six research councils are to keep a close eye on the relative success of men and women applying for grants and fellowships. The move coincides with the revelation that, although success rates are similar, there is clear evidence that a higher proportion of male than female academics apply for research awards.

Margaret Beckett, the President of the Board of Trade and as such, the cabinet minister responsible for science, said last week that she has asked the director-general of research councils, Sir John Cadogan, to report annually on the success rates of women in obtaining grants and fellowships.

Beckett holds a degree in metallurgy and worked briefly as a researcher before entering politics. Speaking at the annual meeting of the pressure group Save British Science, she said she was determined to encourage more women to enjoy a scientific career. “We run the risk of wasting the talents of half the population,” she warned.

But she also said that it is necessary to ensure that women work in a fair and unbiased environment, adding that there had been “some disquiet” over a recent study of the competition for fellowships at the Swedish Medical Research Council which revealed bias in favour of male candidates (see the Commentary by Wennerås and Wold, Nature 387, 341–343; 1997).

According to Beckett, a survey of success rates in British research councils carried out after the publication of the Swedish data did not reveal a similar pattern, the rates between the two sexes being “very similar”.

Last year, for example, 24 per cent of male grant applicants to the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and 26 per cent to the Medical Research Council (MRC), were successful; equivalent rates for female candidates were 19 and 29 per cent.

Similar conclusions are revealed in a survey, Women and Peer Review, published this week by the Wellcome Trust's Unit for Policy Research in Science and Medicine. Also prompted by the Swedish study, the Wellcome survey concludes that there is “no evidence of sex discrimination” in the award of the trust's project or programme grants, or its senior research fellowships.

But both the Wellcome survey and a parallel survey by the MRC reveal that women do not apply for awards in the proportions that would be expected from the number of female academics working in British universities (see Correspondence, page 438).

In the case of Wellcome, five times as many men as women applied to the trust, even though there were only marginally more male academic biomedical staff than female in the academic year 1995-96 (indeed, in the under-25 age group, there were 50 per cent more female biomedical academics than male). Similar statistics emerge from the MRC survey; only 21.3 per cent of applicants for programme grants were women.

The surveys' authors offer no explanations. But they recommend that research funding bodies should, as part of their efforts to ensure equal opportunities, work together to investigate the factors that may prevent women from applying for grants in the expected numbers.

Officials at the Department of Trade and Industry point out that efforts to redress the sex balance in research include the Dorothy Hodgkin fellowships, introduced by the Royal Society in 1995. They also argue that the new concordat for contract research should enable more women to remain longer in the academic community.