Is evaluation of scientist's objective

There is ample data demonstrating that female scientists advance at a far slower rate than their male colleagues. The low numbers of female professors in European and North American universities is, thus, not solely an effect of few women in the recruitment pool but also to obstacles specific to the female gender. Together with her colleague Christine Wennerås, Agnes Wold conducted a study of the evaluation process at the Swedish Medical Research Council. Evaluators judged the "scientific competence", "research proposal" and "methodology" of applicants for post-doctoral positions in 1995. By relating the scores for "scientific competence" to the applicants' scientific productivity and other factors using multiple regression, Wennerås and Wold demonstrated that the applicant's sex exerted a strong influence on the "competence" score so that male applicants were perceived as being more competent than female applicants of equal productivity. The study was published in Nature (vol 387, p 341-3, 1997) and inspired several studies of the review process in other research councils in Europe.