Gender monitoring (part 1): how women fare in SNSF project funding

The Swiss research landscape suffers from a chronic underrepresentation of women. This can also be seen in the share of women applying for funding at the SNSF. But how has this share evolved over time? And have women been less successful in raising funds?

The SNSF does a yearly gender monitoring to stay on top of recent developments in the share of female researchers applying for and receiving funding. The results are regularly presented to the Gender Equality Commission of the SNSF, as well as to the National Research Council, in order for them to give evidence-based advise and take decisions. To take the appropriate measures to improve gender equality in the Swiss research landscape, the SNSF and its Gender Equality office must understand the situation of female applicants. We start our series on the gender monitoring by looking at simple descriptive statistics: success rates and funding rates of female and male applicants.