Pharyngula, the blog of an evolutionist, has an interesting entry titled The Cost of Being a Woman in Science. It notes a letter in Nature pointing out that only 3 of the 25 European Young Investigator grants were awarded to women, despite 25% of the applicants having been female. The European Science Foundation is refusing to release the records necessary to determine exactly what happened.
This may be because when such data is released, it leads to the publications of papers like Nepotism and Sexism in Peer Review, which highlighted severe discrimination problems in the peer review process at the Swedish Medical Research Council.
Three out of six productivity variables generated statistically significant models capable of predicting the competence scores the applicants were awarded: total impact, first-author impact and first-author citations. The model that provided the highest explanatory power was the one based on total impact (r2=0.47). In all three models, we found two factors as well as scientific productivity that had a significant influence on competence scores: the gender of the applicant and the affiliation of the applicant with a committee member.According to the multiple-regression model based on total impact, female applicants started from a basic competence level of 2.09 competence points (the intercept of the multiple regression curve) and were given an extra 0.21 points for competence. So, for a female scientist to be awarded the same competence score as a male colleague, she needed to exceed his scientific productivity by 64 impact points (95 per cent confidence interval: 35-93 impact points).
(Emphasis added.)
There's an old saying that for a woman to be treated as well as a man, she has to work twice as hard, but it appears the real figure is two and a half times, even in this modern age. Not good.
It may be wise for women researchers to use just a first initial and a last name, rather than expose a visibly female name, when applying for grants or publishing, and a strong argument is being made for revoking the anonymity of reviewers.