2024/03/04 by A. Hultgren, Nicole MF Patras, Jenna Hicks · 2 voices
Social Sciences · Decision Sciences · Medicine · #Diversity and Career in Medicine #scientometrics and bibliometrics research #Health and Medical Research Impacts
paper · doi:10.7554/elife.92339
openalex publication_date 2024/03/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/16
Organizations that fund research are keen to ensure that their grant selection processes are fair and equitable for all applicants. In 2020, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation introduced blinding to the first stage of the process used to review applications for Beckman Young Investigator (BYI) awards: applicants were instructed to blind the technical proposal in their initial Letter of Intent by omitting their name, gender, gender-identifying pronouns, and institutional information. Here we examine the impact of this change by comparing the data on gender and institutional prestige of the applicants in the first four years of the new policy (BYI award years 2021-2024) with data on the last four years of the old policy (2017-2020). We find that under the new policy, the distribution of applicants invited to submit a full application shifted from those affiliated with institutions regarded as more prestigious to those outside of this group, and that this trend continued through to the final program awards. We did not find evidence of a shift in the distribution of applicants with respect to gender.