Gendered Topics and Grant Evaluations

• Authors: Lídia Farré, Ha Luong and Judit Vall Castelló
• BSE Working Paper: 1608 | October 2026
• Keywords: gender bias, public research grants, research topics, peer review, structural topic modeling
• JEL codes: O38, J16, I23

Are research proposals focusing on female-oriented topics evaluated differently? We examine this question using 4,291 successful and unsuccessful applications to a public research funding program in Catalonia. We employ structural topic modeling to construct a measure of the extent to which each proposal focuses on female-oriented topics. Using a reviewer fixed-effects model, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in this measure is associated with a 0.06-standard- deviation decrease in reviewer scores. The penalty is driven by male reviewers, who assign lower scores to male-led groups working on more female-oriented topics, while we find no significant penalty among female reviewers. Our findings document a new dimension of gender disparities in public research funding: the topics researchers study.