Petition for NHMRC to create gender equity needs your signature

Female senior academics inequitably receive less funding than males.

Forwarded on behalf of the CCS GEDI committee

A petition has been released calling on medical researchers and the greater scientific community of Australia to challenge the NHMRC to urgently commence at strategic overhaul of current funding schemes to ensure Equitable funding for Women in STEMM.

The petition is gaining momentum, and has over 1700 signatures. Please read the article in the petition and lend your support for a more equitable NHMRC funding system for women in STEM, to retain women, retain diverse teams and continue to produce diverse research for Australia's knowledge economy by signing the petition here and sharing amongst your networks: https://chng.it/zbgqLfwN 

Fund women in STEM equitably

Australia’s largest government run medical research grant funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), is awarding women significantly less funding than their male counterparts in a broken system, one which requires an urgent strategic overhaul to provide equitable outcomes for all researchers.

“Australia needs a diverse and equitable research landscape to tackle our current and future global health challenges.” https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/is-australias-largest-medical-research-funding-body-doing-enough-to-retain-women-in-stemm/

Career success in research depends on key metrics including: (1) research publications; (2) conference presentations and (3) the successful award of grants. Government funded grants and fellowships enable researchers to continue their long-term research contributions to enhance Australian’s knowledge economy and provide essential career development through addressing the three key metrics to retain their competitiveness. For many researchers, government funded grants and fellowships are the sole source of their salaries and those of the early career researchers they supervise, and ensure the provision of laboratory consumables, tools and technology to perform their research. Lack of funding is the main driver of the loss of highly qualified and experienced researchers from academia, and also a major promotion hurdle. These researchers continue to be disproportionately women.

“In academia, women make up approximately half of early-career researchers (ECRs), consisting of junior investigators with a PhD or equivalent in STEMM, but the ‘scissor graph’ demographic shows that women continue to be excluded from fully participating in science, with a striking loss of women as seniority increases.”

The largest contributing factor to this lack of retention of women in Science Technology Engineering Maths and Medicine (STEMM) is that women receive fewer grants, or, if funded, are awarded less money, due to gender bias in the peer-review system, which is clearly demonstrated by the recent NHMRC Investigator Grant outcomes. These grants comprise approximately 40% of the NHMRC annual funding and are awarded to single investigators, provide funding that supports the salaries and consumable expenses in the investigator’s laboratory. The gendered loss of funding significantly impacts the ability of women investigators to conduct research and hence the ability of women to produce the key metrics required for promotion and retention.

“Although an equivalent number of grant applications were received from female and male researchers, men were disproportionately awarded a staggering 23% more grants, corresponding to an extra $95 million in funding awarded to men each year.”  

Gendered funding outcomes are not a new issue, but it is one that requires urgent change.  The NHMRC needs to take responsibility and act now to support and improve the retention of women in STEMM.

We are calling on the NHMRC to improve equity for women in STEMM by allocating the same amount of funding to each gender (including a separate pot for non-binary applicants) and to set quotas at each of the Investigator Grant (fellowship) levels for each gender to ensure that all academic levels are supported with equity. Please sign with your support for equitable funding for women in STEMM.

Best wishes

CCS GEDI COMMITTEE

• CHAIR- Dr Jessica Borger
• DEPUTY CHAIR- Dr Michelle Zajac
• EXECUTIVE OFFICER - Mr Elan L'Estrange-Stranieri 
• HDR representative - Ms Alexandra Dimitropoulos
• EMCR representative - Dr Meaghan Clough
• Dr Catherine Carmichael
• Dr Zhouije Ding
• Dr Omar Ibrahim
  
• Dr Scott Kolbe
  
• Dr Loretta Piccenna
  
• Dr Lenka Vodstrcil

https://www.monash.edu/medicine/ccs/equity-diversity-inclusion

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands on which we live and work and pay our respects to Elders past, present and future