More women awarded ERC Starting Grants
The number of women receiving European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants is now a third, according to the latest statistics.
The share of women amongst the successful candidates in the 2013 Starting Grant call increased from 24% last year to 30%. The 6% increase concurs with the continuing trend seen in recent years.
The current call attracted a total number of 3,329 applications, a 50% increase compared to the corresponding group last year. Due to the substantially increased number of applications, the overall success rate dropped to around 9%; a total of 287 grants will be awarded.
In this call, grants were awarded to researchers of 34 different nationalities, hosted in 162 different institutions from 22 European countries. Thirteen countries, including the UK, Germany and Israel, will host five grantees or more. The average age of selected researchers is about 34 years. Furthermore, around 44% of the applicants were selected in the domain ‘Physical Sciences and Engineering’, nearly 38% in ‘Life Sciences’ and just over 18% in ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’.
The Starting Grants will also allow the selected scientists to build their own research teams, engaging in total over 1,000 postdocs and PhD students as ERC team members.
