Last year, despite efforts made to reduce bias, proposals for medium and large programs on the Hubble Space Telescope had an acceptance rate of 24% for programs led by men and 13% for programs led by women, an imbalance largely in keeping with the telescope's history. This year, in one of the most competitive cycles ever, that suddenly changed to a near-equivalent 8.7% acceptance rate for women and an 8.0% acceptance rate for men, reversing the trend seen over the past 15 cycles. What happened? Anonymized proposals.
Interesting but unsurprising. I'd be more interested to see what happens with regards to prominent researchers versus novices. Are people being awarded time essentially because they've already been awarded time, or are they more successful simply because they write better proposals ? My guess would be more variability in the proposal quality of famous researchers. That is, if you're well-known, you probably do have a better chance of getting a lower-quality proposal accepted, but on average your proposals tend to be better.
https://www.metafilter.com/178225/Focus-on-the-Science-Not-the-Scientist
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