Gender and disciplinary differences in 39,280 SNSF grant peer review reports | Stefan Müller

Stefan Müller presents an analysis of 39,280 peer review reports on 11,385 grant proposals submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation between 2016 and 2023, across 21 disciplines. Fine-tuned transformer models classified more than 1.3 million review sentences by evaluation criterion and sentiment. Reviews in the social sciences and humanities were longer and more critical, and focused less on the applicant's track record, than reviews in the natural sciences and engineering. Female reviewers wrote longer reviews that followed the evaluation criteria more closely and were more positive in tone. The talk closes with what these differences mean for fairness and reviewer calibration in research funding. Speaker: Stefan Müller (University College Dublin) Talk title: Gender and disciplinary differences in 39,280 SNSF grant peer review reports Session: Session 3 · Evaluating science, and its evaluators Recorded at AI in Metascience 2026, an online conference organised by FORRT (Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training), 28–30 September 2026. Day 1, Monday 28 September: AI in the research pipeline. Programme and abstracts: https://forrt.org/ai-metascience/ FORRT: https://forrt.org