Christine Wennerås and Agnes Wold analysed the application process for Swedish post-doctoral medical research fellowships that year (they had to make freedom of information requests to get their data). They observed a field of 114 applicants competing for 20 jobs. 46% of the applicants were female, but only 4 of them won positions.

Using multiple regressions, the authors estimated which characteristics of candidates led to high “scientific competence” ratings from the reviewers: what was the relative importance of educational background, publication and citation records,¹ the applicant’s gender, the presence of relationships to assessors and other factors?²

The results are shocking. Being female was a major liability: a candidate would need to have 3 extra articles in Nature or Science (or 20 in decent specialist journals) just to counteract the disadvantages she faced for being a woman. There were two women in the pool so prolific that they won post-doc jobs this way, but for most good female scientists there was only one hope for getting a position: knowing someone on the review committee.

Wennerås and Wold measured these personal connections by observing whether a member of the committee recused himself from reviewing the application because he knew the applicant. The presence of such a relationship conferred an advantage of similar size to the advantage of being male.

Sweden has a reputation for some of the most progressive attitudes and policies on gender relations in the world. It is disturbing that despite this, the patriarchy (accidental or otherwise) was still firmly in place in 1995. The most hopeful explanatory hypothesis that Wennerås and Wold offered for their results was the fact that 90% of the application reviewers were male. But it’s hard to say when that will change.

• Read the study, Nepotism and Sexism in Peer Review