What you’re describing in a research grant proposal is important but how you say it also matters a lot, new research shows.

Probably the wrong wording.

The study looked at health research proposals submitted to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in particular, the wording they used. It found that men and women tend to use different types of words in this context, both of which carry their own downsides. Female authors tend to use ‘narrow’ words — more topic-specific language — while men tend to go for ‘broad’ words, the team reports. The findings further point to some of the biases proposal reviewers can fall prey to, and may help design effective automated review software in the future.

The words in our grants

“Broad words are something that reviewers and evaluators may be swayed by, but they’re not really reflecting a truly valuable underlying idea,” says Julian Kolev, an assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business in Dallas, Texas, and the lead author of the study.

It’s “more about style and presentation than the underlying substance.”

The narrower language used by female authors seems to result in lower review scores overall, the team notes. However, broad language, which tended to see more use with male authors, let them down later throughout the scientific process: proposals that used more broad words saw fewer publications in top-tier journals after receiving funding. They also weren’t more likely to generate follow-up funding that publications with narrower language.

The researchers classified words as being “narrow” if they appeared more often in proposals dealing with a particular topic than others. Words that were more common across topics were classified as “broad”. In effect, this process allowed the team to determine whether certain terms were ‘specialized’ for a particular field or were more versatile. This data-driven approach resulted in word classifications that might not have been obvious from the outset: “community” and “health” were deemed to be narrow words, for example, whereas “bacteria” and “detection” were deemed to be broad words.

Reviewers favored proposals with broader words — and those words were used more often by men. So, should we just teach women to write like men? The team “would be hesitant to recommend” it, which is basically science-speak for ‘no’. Kolev says we should instead look at the potential biases reviewers can have, especially in cases where they are favoring language that doesn’t necessarily result in better research.

“The narrower and more technical language is probably the right way to think about and evaluate science,” he says.

Kolev’s team analyzed 6794 proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation by US-based researchers between 2008 and 2017 and how reviewers scored them. Overall, they report, reviewers tended to give female applicants lower scores, although the authors’ identities were kept secret during the review process. This gap in reviewer scores stood firm even after the team controlled for a host of conditions, such as the applicant’s current career stage or their publication record. The only element that correlated with the gap is the language applicants used in their titles and proposal descriptions, the team reports.

The team isn’t exactly sure whether their findings are broadly applicable to all scientific grant application review processes or not. Other research into this subject, but this one dealing with the peer-review process at the NIH, didn’t find the same pattern. It might be a peculiarity of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.