Strategies to Prevent or Reduce Gender Bias in Peer Review of Research Grants: A Rapid Scoping Review.

OBJECTIVE: To review the literature on strategies implemented or identified to prevent or reduce gender bias in peer review of research grants. METHODS: Studies of any type of qualitative or quantitative design examining interventions to reduce or prevent gender bias during the peer review of health-related research grants were included. Electronic databases including MEDLINE, EMBASE, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), PsycINFO, Joanna Briggs, the Cochrane Library, Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) Reviews, and the Campbell Library were searched from 2005 to April 2016. A search for grey (i.e., difficult to locate or unpublished) literature was conducted and experts in the field were consulted to identify additional potentially relevant articles. Two individuals screened titles and abstracts, full-text articles, and abstracted data with discrepancies resolved by a third person consistently. RESULTS: After screening 5524 citations and 170 full-text articles, one article evaluating gender-blinding of grant applications using an uncontrolled before-after study design was included. In this study, 891 applications for long-term fellowships in 2006 were included and 47% of the applicants were women. These were scored by 13 peer reviewers (38% were women). The intervention included eliminating references to gender from the applications, letters of recommendations, and interview reports that were sent to the committee members for evaluation. The proportion of successful applications led by women did not change with gender-blinding, although the number of successful applications that were led by men increased slightly. CONCLUSIONS: There is limited research on interventions to mitigate gender bias in the peer review of grants. Only one study was identified and no difference in the proportion of women who were successful in receiving grant funding was observed. Our results suggest that interventions to prevent gender bias should be adapted and tested in the context of grant peer review to determine if they will have an impact.

The effect of food environments on fruit and vegetable intake as modified by time spent at home: a cross-sectional study.

OBJECTIVE: There is a growing body of research that investigates how the residential neighbourhood context relates to individual diet. However, previous studies ignore participants' time spent in the residential environment and this may be a problem because time-use studies show that adults' time-use pattern can significantly vary. To better understand the role of exposure duration, we designed a study to examine 'time spent at home' as a moderator to the residential food environment-diet association. DESIGN: Cross-sectional observational study. SETTINGS: City of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. PARTICIPANTS: 2411 adults aged 25-65. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: Frequency of vegetable and fruit intake (VFI) per day. RESULTS: To examine how time spent at home may moderate the relationship between residential food environment and VFI, the full sample was split into three equal subgroups--short, medium and long duration spent at home. We detected significant associations between density of food stores in the residential food environment and VFI for subgroups that spend medium and long durations at home (ie, spending a mean of 8.0 and 12.3 h at home, respectively--not including sleep time), but no associations exist for people who spend the lowest amount of time at home (mean=4.7 h). Also, no associations were detected in analyses using the full sample. CONCLUSIONS: Our study is the first to demonstrate that time spent at home may be an important variable to identify hidden population patterns regarding VFI. Time spent at home can impact the association between the residential food environment and individual VFI.