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

[Kris Gulati]

Just a quick note to say thank you to everyone for such wonderful feedback — I really appreciate it!!

Regards,

Kris
________________________________
From: MetaSTEM <metastem-bounces at lists.ucmerced.edu> on behalf of Tyler Marghetis <tyler.marghetis at gmail.com>
Sent: 19 February 2026 08:13
To: metastem at lists.ucmerced.edu <metastem at lists.ucmerced.edu>
Subject: Re: [MetaSTEM] First MetaSTEM seminar of 2026: Kris Gulati on science funding

Hi MetaSTEM community,

Reminder that our first MetaSTEM talk of the semester is today at 12:30 in SSM 235. Thanks again to Kris Gulati for sharing his work on science funding disparities.

See you soon!
Tyler

On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 1:02 PM Tyler Marghetis <tyler.marghetis at gmail.com<mailto:tyler.marghetis at gmail.com>> wrote:
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<http://www.tylermarghetis.com/>
tyler.marghetis at gmail.com<mailto:tyler.marghetis at gmail.com> | +1.619.252.7798<tel:+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
--

Sent from a tiny device...

--
Tyler Marghetis, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Cognitive & Information Sciences
University of California, Merced
www.tylermarghetis.com<http://www.tylermarghetis.com>
tyler.marghetis at gmail.com<mailto:tyler.marghetis at gmail.com> | +1.619.252.7798
I use the pronouns: he, him, his
I have moderate face-blindness; if you see me out of context, I may not recognize you, so please say hello.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/metastem/attachments/20260220/3905855f/attachment.htm>