[MetaSTEM] First MetaSTEM seminar of 2026: Kris Gulati on science funding

[Tyler Marghetis]

Hi scholars of science,

This Thursday we'll have *our first MetaSTEM meeting of 2026*.

Please join us this *Thursday at 12:30pm in SSM 235*. (Please note the
change in location; SSM 235 is just around the corner from SSM 230.)

Our first speaker is Kris Gulati, who'll present an early paper on gender
differences in science funding. Abstract below.

Also, our April speaker had to cancel, so we now have one open spot this
semester. *If you'd like to share your work on April 23rd, please let me
and Christian know! *We encourage presentations of work at any stage, but
are especially excited to hear about early-stage and in-progress work.

See you Thursday!
Tyler and Christian

---
Abstract: "Scientific discovery depends not only on what ideas are funded,
but on how researchers translate ideas into resource requests that shape
teams, training, and future knowledge production. Using a novel dataset
covering the full universe of funded and unfunded grant applications to two
major philanthropic science funders in Europe between 2011 and 2022, linked
to peer-review scores and investigators’ prior research records, we examine
whether gender differences arise in the funding process. We document that
female principal investigators receive 6.4–7.4% less funding per
application than male investigators. This gap is mostly explained by
differences at the proposal stage: women request 5-5.4% less funding,
conditional on proposal quality and researcher characteristics. This is
despite there being no incentives to request smaller grants, a claim we
confirm empirically. Using granular budget data, we show that this gap
manifests itself in team size formation, with female investigators
systematically proposing smaller PhD student teams. We find no significant
differences across other budget categories. Exploiting heterogeneity across
sub-groups to shed light on underlying mechanisms, we show that the gender
gap in funding requests is concentrated among: early-career researchers,
lower prior publications, lower prior average research impact factor, and
converges with experience through repeated applications, consistent with
learning and information frictions. These findings shift attention from
evaluators to applicants, highlighting how differences in resource
construction - rather than evaluation bias - can generate durable
disparities in scientific capacity. Extrapolating to the U.S. context
suggests that women may be systematically requesting on the order of $0.75
billion less annually from major public funders, with implications for
training capacity, cumulative knowledge production, and the organization of
scientific labor."

-- 
Tyler Marghetis, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Cognitive & Information Sciences
University of California, Merced
www.tylermarghetis.com
tyler.marghetis at gmail.com | +1.619.252.7798
I use the pronouns: he, him, his
I have moderate face-blindness <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia>;
if you see me out of context, I may not recognize you
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