A persistent problem. Traditional gender roles hold back female scientists.

Women hold less than 15% of the full professorships in Europe, even though more than half of the European student population is female (Eu, 2006). in the light of this, there are contrasting views about the future of women in academic research. Some analysts perceive an intractable gender gap at the higher levels of academia owing to the lower success rate of women at every step up the career ladder; others expect the gap to close over time, although it might take many years for equality to be achieved. a metaanalysis of 21 studies has shown that men have a statistically significant (7%) higher chance of receiving grants than women (Bornmann, 2007; Bornmann et al, 2007). We have noticed that female applicants have had a consistently lower success rate when applying for the European Molecular Biology Organization’s (EMBO) Long-term Fellowships (LtFs) and young investigator programme (yip)—in which success rate is measured as the proportion of awards given to applicants of each sex. in this study, we investigated various aspects of how a scientist’s gender influences selection processes and careers.