Women scientists who work on infectious disease research are less likely to receive funding for studies than men, according to a new report.

The study, published today in the BMJ Open journal, shows that women scientists specialising in infectious disease research have fewer studies funded.  They also receive less money across most topic areas in the subject than their male peers. These gender discrepancies have remained broadly unchanged for more than a decade, the findings show.

The researchers analysed 6,052 studies and found that almost three quarters of these grants were awarded to men, with the remainder awarded to women. They also found that men got most of the total investment at £1.786 billion (78.5%) while women got £488 million (21.5%).

An analysis of the sums awarded to individual research projects showed that women also received substantially less money than men did. The average value of a grant awarded to men was £179,389 compared with £125,556 for women.

Professor Rifat Atun, the paper’s co-author and Head of the Health Management Group at Imperial College Business School, said: “The research shows that more work needs to be done by funders and academia to explore the reasons behind why there is a such a funding shortfall for women in this area of research.  It is vital that women are appropriately supported especially as the UK government is committed to boosting the number of women choosing a career in science.”

Male lead researchers were awarded more than their female counterparts across all topic categories in infectious disease research, with the exception of neurological and sexually transmitted infections. 

The authors emphasise that they were unable to assess the success and failure rates of grant applications by gender,  so can’t draw any conclusions about potential gender bias for this aspect.  Similarly, they did not know the seniority of the lead researcher in each of the studies, so couldn’t tell whether there were more men than women scientists at senior level leading research projects and seeking funding, which might in part go towards explaining the discrepancy.

However, previous research indicates that there are significant gender differences in the amount of funding awarded for all studies, even after taking account of the seniority of the lead researcher.

Researchers based their findings on an analysis of funding awards made to UK institutions for all infectious disease research from 1997 to 2010.  The research was carried out jointly by Imperial College Business School, UCL and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.