To Örebro University

Academic careers continue to be gendered, in the Nordic region, Europe and globally. Access to research funding is one of the keys to success in academic careers, providing essential support for research development and publishing. Success in the competition for external research funding is currently used as one measure of scientific excellence at both individual and institutional levels. International research on the allocation of research funding and gender has not demonstrated a systematic gender bias in men’s favour, but has produced rather contradictory results on different funding systems and instruments. However, excellence-marked funding has been shown to be especially gender biased. In external competitive funding the national research funding agencies play an important role. In Europe, the research funding organisations in the Nordic countries, especially Sweden and Norway, have been among the most pro-active in engaging with gender (in)equalities in the funding systems throughout the 2000s (see, e.g., EC 2009). On the basis of ongoing and recent Nordic and European research projects the authors are engaged with (including a gender equality review of the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science [Riksbankens Jubileumsfond] grant allocation processes, and a new four-year H2020 project GRANTeD), and recent policy initiatives, the presentation discusses gender challenges in research funding dynamics. These have been identified across the funding process and cycle, in: patterns of application behaviour, peer review, evaluation criteria and procedures, excellence initiatives, policies and practices of funding bodies, access to data by gender, decision-making, and the very allocation of funding. Until recently, how gender and other key power axes may intersect in the funding cycle is relatively rarely addressed in policy and monitoring in this arena, with the intersection of age and gender perhaps as an exception in this respect.