Transcript: RN Breakfast interview with Professor Anne Kelso AO on gender equity in research funding

Listen now: 'It's the big picture': NHMRC divides grant funding equally 

Patricia Karvelas: Gender equality is a problem plenty of workplaces are wrestling with from corporate boardrooms to federal parliament. The National Health and Medical Research Council might not be the first organisation that springs to mind when talking gender equality, but that could be about to change. The Council has decided that from next year, funding for its most prestigious high level grant program will be split 50/50 between men and women and non-binary people. Professor Anne Kelso is the CEO of the NHMRC and she joins me now. Professor Kelso, welcome.

Professor Anne Kelso: Thank you, Patricia.

Patricia Karvelas: First of all, what are the Investigator Grants and why are they so sought after?

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, these are fellowships. They provide a salary for our very best investigators and they're available to people from really early in their career, just after they finish their PhD, at various levels, all the way through to our most senior professors. Apart from the salary for the investigator themselves, they also provide a research support package so they can help to support their research team.

So we can give around 225 or so of these each year. Not very many for the whole of the research sector, but incredibly valuable for those who receive them. And each grant is for five years.

Patricia Karvelas: Okay. So they're pretty lucrative or at least, you know, they're sought after. What's the current gender split within the Investigator Grants program?

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, if you look at them at the earliest stages, then we have more women than men applying. And when you go to the most senior stage, we have about four times as many men as women applying

Patricia Karvelas: Four times?

Professor Anne Kelso: Four times. And so this is a really interesting situation because it's not new. Even 21 years ago, in 2001, we had more women applying at the most junior level. So we've hardly shifted the dial in our fellowship scheme in all of those 21 years.

So what we see is that women come in in great numbers and they are highly competitive, they do very well, and then they rapidly drop out in that kind of time of 5 to 15 years, post-PhD, we see a dramatic falling away of the number of women applying for these grants.

Their ability to win the grants is very similar to that of men. So that’s not the issue. The issue is the disappearance of women from our workforce so that we have a very gender “undiverse” senior workforce. And as I said, it's not new.

Patricia Karvelas: So what's happening in that time before we get to the remedy you've come up with, which is really interesting, have we worked out what's happening in that time?

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, I think it's the sort of things that happen to women in professions regardless of the field. Of course, having families is a big part of it. But the other thing we know is that there are very many barriers to women progressing according to merit in the workplace.

They tend to be given more service roles, they tend to be passed over for promotion, they tend to be asked to do the more menial tasks. They take on more mentoring and teaching and have less time for their research.

And we've just seen a fantastic large study in the US that showed that even to the same level of seniority and the amount of contribution women receive less credit through authorship of research publications and inventorship on patents than men for the same work.

So the barriers are there. I think we’re really familiar with them, it’s just they’re true in the research workforce as they are across our community unfortunately.

Patricia Karvelas: So this is pretty drastic action by the NHMRC. You say this is a world first by any national funding body running a major grant scheme. Why is it necessary to split the money down the middle immediately and not in steps over a few years to ensure the best ideas are still funded?

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, first of all, as far as we know, it’s the first time a major national funder has done this. But we, like many others, have been using smaller interventions for a long time and they’ve helped, but they haven’t been sufficient and that’s why we are now taking this much bolder step.

It will still be done really carefully and so the details will, I think, ensure that we continue to fund incredibly meritorious applications. Something that I've seen at NHMRC in my time there is the extraordinary quality of applications we receive from women and from men, and there's always very many more excellent applications submitted than can be funded.

So we don't think from our modelling of the data that we're going to see a significant drop in the merit or the quality. We're simply making a relatively small adjustment in the end to the score cut off to enable more women to make their way through that very difficult mid-career period.

Patricia Karvelas: Are you worried about the science that now won't get funded because the project is headed by a man?

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, I think that we can worry about the science that hasn't been funded all this time that would be led by women. And we will continue to have outstanding research done by men and by women. I think we'll get more diverse research because really the underlying reason for this kind of move is that we know we need diversity in the research workforce to get the best possible outcomes.

You need a range of perspectives if you're going to deal with the really challenging health problems that we face in our society today. And so having that full range of views, gender diversity, other sorts of diversity as well, of course, is really critical to getting those best outcomes for the public investment in research.

Patricia Karvelas: Have you had any pushback over this decision? It means basically that male researchers will face more competition for a lot less funds. Have they? Has there been a resistance?

Professor Anne Kelso: Yes. And I'm not at all surprised that that would be the case. We consulted quite intensively earlier this year, and we were disappointed that far fewer men turned up or contributed to that consultation than did women. But we never know, of course, whether that's because they weren't paying attention or because they feel that they couldn't speak up. Some are speaking up now, and I welcome that because it means we can really engage on these really complex issues.

I'm also aware that, you know, I've also been on a journey here to understand the data, to see how entrenched these issues were. I didn't really realise how bad it was when I was a researcher myself. And so I know many other people haven't been on that journey and may not be aware of just how difficult these issues are to address just by waiting or by relatively minor interventions.

Patricia Karvelas: If male researchers have been getting the vast amount of top tier grant funding for years to date, is there a boys’ club there who won't be very pleased? ... You say yes, you welcome the discussion. But just be honest with me about how how big this rift is.

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, of course, there's a risk with any policy change we make, and this is certainly a big one, I'm not going to suggest it isn't, there's a risk that people won't be happy. And I have to say I'm really used to that because all of the changes we've made since I've been at NHMRC and I know my predecessor faced the same kind of issues, there's this pushback you need to talk it through. It doesn't mean you persuade people. We have to accept and live with that difference.

I think it's important to know, too, that we'll be monitoring the outcomes of this intervention very closely. We run this scheme every year. Every year we'll be looking at how it's affected the behaviour of applicants. Are more women applying? Is there less need for the intervention? What would have happened if we didn't have the intervention? Have we made any difference at all? And if it's not working, we'll stop.

And if it is working, then as soon as it's really achieved its goal, then we will stop. So I look forward to that very much.

Patricia Karvelas: I've got one question which I think I know the answer to, but I'd like to put it to you, which is why can't they mask the application? So, you know, the issue is, though, that you're just not getting enough from women, right?

Professor Anne Kelso: Well, masking can work in some circumstances. And there's another scheme where we're looking quite closely at whether we can mask the identity of the applicants.

The difficulty with this big fellowship scheme, Investigator Grant scheme, is that a significant part of the score is based on the track record of the person. And so you can’t mask who the person is with 70% of the score based on their particular track record of publications, their contribution to the improvement of health or other issues. So it’s just not a scheme that’s well suited to that so that’s why we’re taking this other approach.

Patricia Karvelas: So what, if anything, do you think this will do for the science produced as a result, if you suddenly have gender parity at a top level of research funding? Will we start studying new areas? Will there be new approaches?

Professor Anne Kelso: I think there will, I think we’ll broaden the range of topics that are of interest. I mean, we know that many researchers pursue topics that are relevant to their own health. They will have had their own experiences with ill health or people close to them will have. And we know that affects the type of research the people do and the perspectives that they bring.

You know, that valuable perspective of somebody with lived experience and personal experience as well as the passion and the intelligence to undertake the research itself. So I would expect that over time we will get a broadening and slight shift in the topics that are researched.

But I think the other point to make is you said that there'd be a dramatic shift at the highest levels. The way we are doing this, it won't immediately make equal numbers of grants at the most senior level. And this is something that's not well understood in the sector. The way it will be done will be a little bit more gradual than that. It will be overall, we will aim to have equal numbers of men and women at the leadership level. That's a complication. But it does mean that the progress will be a little bit more gradual than it initially looks.

Patricia Karvelas: Really interesting. Thank you so much for joining us.

Professor Anne Kelso: Thank you, Patricia.

Patricia Karvelas: Professor Anne Kelso is CEO of the National Health and Medical Research Council.