The growing literature on gender inequality in academia attests to the challenge that awaits female researchers during their academic careers. However, research has not yet conclusively resolved whether these biases persist during the peer review process of research grant funding and whether they impact respective funding decisions. Whereas many have argued for the existence of gender inequality in grant peer reviews and outcomes, others have demonstrated that gender equality is upheld during these processes. In the present paper, we illustrate how these opinions have come to such opposing conclusions and consider methodological and contextual factors that render these findings inconclusive. More specifically, we argue that a more comprehensive approach is needed to further the debate, encompassing individual and systemic biases as well as more global social barriers. We also argue that examining gender biases during the peer review process of research grant funding poses critical methodological challenges that deserve special attention. We conclude by providing directions for possible future research and more general considerations that may improve grant funding opportunities and career paths for female researchers.

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group ofwomenormenfollowing a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated with the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male-dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype-based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants’ proficiency in their L2, with highly proficient L2 participants resembling native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native language.

The generic use of masculine plural forms in grammatical gender languages has been criticized for activating unequal gender representations that are male dominant. The present study examined whether the recently introduced gender-neutral forms of nominalized adjectives and participles in German provide references that induce more balanced representations. We used cross-linguistic differences as a means to illustrate the flexibility of the gender representation system and investigated both native and nonnative (French–German bilinguals) speakers of German. Although a masculine bias persisted when participants read role nouns in the masculine plural form, the study suggests that the usage of nominalized forms can attenuate this male bias, even for nonnative speakers. The results of the study provide further support for the use of gender-neutral language.

Employing a linguistic-visual paradigm, we investigated whether the grammaticization of gender information impacts readers’ gender representations. French and German were taken as comparative languages, taking into account the male gender bias associated to both languages, as well as the comparative gender biases associated to their plural determiners (French: les [generic] vs. German: die [morphologically feminine]). Bilingual speakers of French and German had to judge whether a pair of facial images representing two men or a man and a woman could represent a gender stereotypical role noun prime (e.g., nurses). The prime was presented in the masculine plural form with or without a plural determiner. Results indicated that the overt grammaticization of the male gender in the masculine form dominated the representation of the role nouns (though interpretable as generic). However, the effect of the determiner was not found, indicating that only gender information associated to a human reference role noun had impacted readers’ representations. The results, discussed in the framework of the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, demonstrated that linguistic-visual paradigms are well-suited to gauge the impact of both stereotype information and grammaticization when processing role nouns. Keywords: gender representation, gender stereotypes, grammatical gender, generic masculine, thinking-for-speaking hypothesis, bilingualism