Wennerås and Wold’s data in Nature is questioned

What is it about?

A new study has re-examined one of the most widely cited papers in the history of gender equity in science — and found the evidence far more fragile than previously believed. In 1997, a short article in Nature by Christine Wennerås and Agnes Wold sent shockwaves through the scientific world. The authors claimed that women applying for research fellowships in Sweden needed to be 2.4 times more productive than men to be rated equally competent. The paper became a symbol of systemic gender bias in academia, cited thousands of times and embedded in policy documents from the European Commission and U.S. National Academies. For the first time, a research team from Sweden has reproduced the study using the original dataset — and the results are surprising. “The original study made history, but it had never been independently reproduced,” says Sandström, lead author of the new article published in Quantitative Science Studies (Vol. 6, 2025). “When we applied more robust methods and adjusted for structural differences across disciplines and review committees, the gender gap essentially disappeared.”

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Photo by Natalie Hua on Unsplash

Photo by Natalie Hua on Unsplash