Gender Imbalance in Cancer Research Grants

This report was intended to reproduce a study published recently in BMJ Open, but using author disambiguation, data, categories, and links from Dimensions. We used the 7,615 grants about cancer received by researchers at UK institutions between 2007 and 2017. Women represented only about 30% of the funded researchers in the UK, and even though grant numbers have fluctuated a lot in these 11 years, the proportion of women receiving grants remained constant. However, the share of grant amount has increased slightly, from 25% to 30% of the total. Using pre-existing categories in Dimensions, we discovered that women received grants in widespread diseases (e.g. obesity, smoking), while men received grants in cancers with very low survival rates (pancreatic and brain cancer).

Using Dimensions, we confirmed the gender imbalance for grant receivers in one field of research; cancer research in the UK.