A gender study of principal investigator lead public R&D centres and funding

ABSTRACT

To survive and grow public Research and Development (R&D) centres need to raise competitive funds (Bazeley 1998; Lee and Om 1996; Muñoz 2007; Santamaría, Brage-Gil and Modrego 2010). The factors that can influence the capacity of national R&D teams within R&D centres to apply for and obtain competitive funding does not seem to have been studied in depth. The purpose of study is to firstly, to examine whether a consistent set of priorities defined by R&D centre lead principal investigators secures more competitive funding. Secondly, to examine whether the PI gender moderates the effect of the PI’s priorities on the amount of competitive public funds that the R&D team of the PI obtains. Our study focuses on R&D activities carried out in Spanish public centres in the areas of Health and Biomedicine. Our results found that there were no gender differences in relation to the acquisition of competitive funding which is contrary to findings of other studies (Mayer and Rathmann 2018; Lerchenmueller and Sorenson, 2018).

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• Principal investigators
• public funding
• R&D
• R&D Teams
• innovation
• Leadership

Acknowledgements

The authors appear in alphabetical order and have contributed equally to this work. This study has benefited from financing from Research Project ECO2014-56580-R and ECO2016-80002-R of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The authors wish to thank Professor Albert N. Link and aynomomous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study has benefited from financing from Research Project ECO2014-56580-R and ECO2016-80002-R of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.