Review of NSF Economics proposals: Gender and institutional patterns

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Rebecca Blank (1991) reported on the results of an experiment in which articles submitted to The American Economic Review were randomly assigned to a doubleor category' for review. Among the patterns she found were that women referees gave lower ratings to single-blind and men were harsher on papers but that there were no significant differences in the acceptance rates by gender for singleor double-blind reviewing. Other research has found gender differences in the outcomes of the reviewing process in economics journals by correlating acceptance rates with the type of reviewing procedure (Marianne Ferber and Michelle Teiman, 1980; Linda Edwards and Ferber, 1989). Based on reviews of grant proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF), this study presents evidence of significant differences in the reviewing of female and male authors by male and female referees. Even when author quality is controlled by comparing ratings on the same paper, female reviewers rate female-authored lower than do their male colleagues. This result still holds when controls for institutional affiliation and experience of reviewer are also included. This indicates that there is a significant downward bias in the ratings by female reviewers of female proposals, independent of paper quality and reviewer background.

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