The Australian Academy of Sciences has thrown its support behind a new quota system dealing with “gender inequities” in the distribution of research grants—despite repeated concerns from commentators that gender quotas do not produce meaningful outcomes.
In a “new intervention”, the country’s health and medical research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), has pledged to provide an equal number of Investigator Grants to women and men.
The NHMRC also said that non-binary researchers would be explicitly included for the first time.
The Investigator Grant scheme is the NHMRC’s largest funding scheme and annually awards around $370 million in funding….