A new analysis of who gets funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has found that ethnic minority researchers don’t get the same level of funding as white researchers. Their odds of success are 32% lower and when they are successful, they apply for – and receive – less funding than their white counterparts. Moreover, applications from ethnic minority researchers are ‘disproportionately’ assessed as not fundable.
The funding picture is similar for women: for every £1 a male applicant successfully applies for, a successful female applicant gets 85p. The EPSRC, the main funder of chemistry research in the UK, says that in both cases this might be partly down to how much women and ethnic minority researchers request ‘rather than a simple reflection of reviewer or panel biases’.
However, the research also suggests that women are more likely to get grant funding than men, especially for fellowships: their predicted chance of success is 31% against 21% for men. There is a similar picture for ethnic minority women, although both men and women have less chance of success: 24% for women and 16% for men.
The research carried out by the Royal Statistical Society and the Alan Turing Institute examined data for 2014 to 2022, which is too early to assess any impact of its equity, diversity, and inclusion strategy introduced in 2022.
Bhavik Patel, a clinical and bioanalytical chemist at the University of Brighton, welcomes the level of detail in the report but notes that ‘success rates for ethnic minority researchers haven’t moved much in recent years’. He’s alarmed by a disparity that seems to widen with age. While the chance of success for white lead applicants dropped from 37% at under-36 to almost 33% for 36–55 year-olds and 32% for over-55s, for ethnic minority researchers their chances fell from 34% for under-36, to 24% for 36–55 year-olds and 21% for over 55s.
Patel suggests that failure to win grants means researchers are pushed into teaching or administration, meaning they are ‘cut off from being able to be successful in the future. I know from my personal experiences that trends in the way applications are written are evolving constantly and if you’re not in the club that can see it, you’re writing something that just doesn’t look or feel the same to a panel and whether [there’s] implicit bias or not, from that point you’re always behind the curve.’
The EPSRC says there is preliminary evidence of a link between prior success and improved outcomes in subsequent applications.
Institutions should provide more support to unsuccessful applicants, says Patel, while the EPSRC could offer the chance to sit in on panels. Without such interventions, he fears the pool of ethnic minority researchers from which to draw reviewers will diminish further.
Natalie Cozier, who was research project manager on a programme offering mentoring and writing support to scientists of Black heritage, funded jointly by the University of Bristol and the EPSRC, also wants more targeted interventions including expanding outreach efforts for self-nominations to the peer review college. She is disappointed the data on ethnicity was not broken down as it had been previously. That lack of granularity risks ‘obscuring disparities and contributing to what I call “data paralysis” – where data is collected but lacks actionable direction, leaving structural inequities unaddressed,’ she adds.
Patel notes the data shows that the composition of a panel matters. Female applicants were ranked more favourably than male applicants when at least one panellist was female, but lower than males when that was not the case. Given the presence of women on panels has helped to positively change decision making for women, Patel argues the same could be done for ethnic minority researchers. One option, he says, is ‘to have ethnicity champions that have had significantly clear training as reviewers’.
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