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Great funding divide

November 2015 - The 2015 round of ARC major grants (for grants commencing in 2016) delivered $357 million for 899 research projects across four individual ARC grant schemes:

• Discovery Projects - $244.9 million for 635 project;
• Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - $70.7 million for 200 projects;
• Discovery Indigenous - $4.1 million for 10 projects; and
• Linkage, Infrastructure, Equipment, and Facilities - $37.9 million for 54 projects.

The Discovery Projects grant scheme, which accounts for most of the annually available ARC major grant funding, received 3584 proposals, of which 635 projects were selected for funding. This equates to an overall success rate of 17.7% - slightly less than in the previous year when 18% of the proposals were successful. The provided total funding of $245 million also fell short of the $250 million awarded in the previous year.

However, as shown in our infographic, a top tier of just six Australian universities accounted for around 65% of the available funding under the Discovery Projects scheme. This was as much a result of the number of applications submitted as also the superior efficiency of their application process. Thus, at the top end of the spectrum the Australian National University achieved a success rate of 25%, while universities such as the University of Wollongong or RMIT were much less efficient in their applications, achieving a success rate of only around 5-6%.

Four of the top six universities had success rates above 22%, while only two unversities outside this tier, the University of Adelaide and the University of Western Australia, demonstrated comparable efficiency with their applications.

investigators (CIs) was similar for males (17.6%) and females (17.4%), a strong gender imbalance among the successful CIs remained, as only around 25% of all CI's listed on grant applications were female.

Successful female CIs were underrepresented across all levels of experience. In the earlier stages of career development (up to 20 years after they have finished a PhD) male CIs were twice as often part of a successful proposal than female CIs, while in the group of researchers with at least 25 years of post-PhD experience the male to female ratio was more than 5:1.

This persistent gender gap in research funding success is an ongoing concern, which the ARC seeks to address with its Gender Equality Action Plan 2015-16, released 16 November.

The plan includes a series of action items for 2015-16, which are:

• monitoring and evaluating the impact of changes to the eligibility requirements under the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award scheme;
• improving the gender balance of membership on ARC selection committees relative to the overall gender balance in particular research fields;
• raising awareness of the option for recipients of fellowships and awards to utilise parental leave and part-time arrangements for caring responsibilities;
• encouraging the development of a Centre-specific equity plan within the Funding Agreement for ARC Centres of Excellence commencing in 2017;
• investigating options for unconscious bias training for ARC College of Experts and/or assessors; and
• monitoring leave provisions under fellowships to ensure continued consistency.