> Advancing one funeral at a time...
> This is not a good thing.

That's my point, but it's not as big of a problem as blog posts make it out to be. Not small by any means though.

> Biology skews female. Success in biology grant applications does not.

I'd like to see proof of this. Let me quote some dubious lines.

> "women are underrepresented in high-ranking positions."

This is to be studied, but the statement in itself means little. Without analysis we could compare with fields where women are over represented. Analysis required.

> "The exact reasons for this attrition are debated"

Attrition? As far as I'm concerned the rates of females in higher positions, while low, has not gone down. If we mean women in science in general then that also has to be analyzed.

> “People are more likely to study issues relevant to their own health,” she said.

Nonsense. People study where there's funding. Breast cancer is studied more than prostate cancer? Give me a break.

Is there no bias? No. What affect does it currently have in funding. Your article points out, we can't tell.

> "The discordance between written feedback and scores suggests subconscious gender bias bleeds into the review process — influencing both male and female reviewers."

So because we tend to praise women more than men and accept failure in women more than men that means what exactly? We should also fund them more easily than men?

> “These findings confirm that it influences us.”

Yes, but this doesn't, by itself, mean anything negative. Which the paper admits.

> "Subconscious gender bias may lead reviewers to hold women to higher standards than men"

It doesn't seem to be possible to get this from the data. I can claim that society is much more tolerant of failure in women but I can't claim this purely from the data in this research, the converse is also true.

> "The authors' analyses suggest that subtle gender bias may continue"

The authors of the study can't even make the claim that you want them to make.

Back to your claim:

> "Success in biology grant applications does not."

The study claimed nothing about success.

> "NIH funding does." ... skew Caucasian.

Not if you're American. Read the link you left here.

I would personally highly agree with this line from your link: "While further examination is needed to identify causes for the differences in NIH R01 grant success, one possibility the authors cite is that the quality of educational and mentoring experience"

But that gets political.

If we're talking about immigrants then again African and West Indies education is sub par (I'm African.) which is a major confounding factor.

> The name behind your former job doesn't mean your idea is any good, but we'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

No, but it means that you likely got better training than someone from an underfunded non-competitive environment. This is one way to judge (even though it is not a perfect test) someone's likelihood of being a good scientist. I think you would agree that good training plays a monumental role in developing a good scientist.

> They are manifestly failing. (Funding for young scientists.)

How so?

> Not on study panels they don't.

Not really relevant to what I was saying about reviews.

> This isn't necessarily good for science. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6312/aaf5239 (in response to track record being important).

I didn't claim it was perfect. Nor did I claim that it will lead to discovering and funding scientists that will have great impact and letting those sometimes fall through the cracks.

What would better? If random selection is better then we can start having an argument. Not that we could really test this.

> Science is hemorrhaging young investigators

* mid career.

And this should follow with a question (that isn't answered by the research you cite): why?

> , and especially women and

Do we have any proof of this? If you were to say "attract" instead of "hemorrhage" I may more easily agree. But in some fields which females seem to prefer this is overwhelmingly false, see health.

> PoCs.

This does not seem to be the fault of the funding institutions.

> I really can't see how you can possibly look at this and go "Oh yeah, this is going good places."

Because institutions like the NIH are making evolutionary strides at allocating money to good science, slowly removing the benefit of unethical behaviour among other things.

Most of the problems you cite though are not related to the funding institutions but to externalities.

Bias, education, governmental funding etc.