Gendered Topics and Grant Evaluations

Lídia Farré, Ha Luong and Judit Vall Castelló

No 1608, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: Are research proposals focusing on female-oriented topics evaluated differently? We examine this question using 4,291 successful and unsuccessful applications to a public research funding program in Catalonia. We employ structural topic modeling to construct a measure of the extent to which each proposal focuses on female-oriented topics. Using a reviewer fixed-effects model, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in this measure is associated with a 0.06-standard- deviation decrease in reviewer scores. The penalty is driven by male reviewers, who assign lower scores to male-led groups working on more female-oriented topics, while we find no significant penalty among female reviewers. Our findings document a new dimension of gender disparities in public research funding: the topics researchers study.

Keywords: gender bias; peer review; public research grants; research topics; structural topic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J16 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
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