Abstract
With some public funding schemes providing funding to fewer than 10% of applicants, an increasing number of researchers will experience a funding rejection. Understanding what stimulates both women’s and men’s persistence in applying for science funding is an important goal of science policy makers, especially as studies find differences in funding levels between male and female scientists (see e.g., Kolev et al. 2020). While funding evaluation (see e.g., Jappelli et al. 2017) has received extensive attention, the gender gap in applicant behavior after rejection, i.e. in persistence for funding, remains understudied. To address this gap,we focus on the effect of feedback after funding rejections on subsequent choices, in terms of reapplication, publishing and career trajectories, of female and male researchers. We aim to answer two research questions. RQ1: Can feedback provided in rejection letters to funding applicants enhance persistence in science funding applications? RQ2: Does reapplication behavior respond differentially to feedback across gender, seniority and applicant quality? The communication of relative rank to rejected candidates has the potential to reduce the gender gap in reapplication, as it anchors candidates’ beliefs about the relative quality of their proposal. Communicating rank in rejection letters may thus stimulate reapplication among the strongest candidates, while deterring the weakest. In addition, experimental studies show that accurate information about relative performance may mitigate the gender gap in willingness to compete (Wozniak et al. 2014). This suggests that the way a rejection is communicated and which kind of information it contains, is an effective and easy-to-implement solution to mitigate gender differences in reapplication, and may ultimately lower existing inequalities in the scientific system. The novelty in this study is the high-stakes field setting. which is novel because much of the gender gap literature stems from low-stakes lab experiments.