Elena Erosheva (UW Professor of Statistics and Social Work) and Sheridan Grant (UW Statistics Ph.D. student) have co-authored with Carole Lee (UW Professor of Philosophy) a Correspondence featured on The Lancet on how “Alternative grant models might perpetuate Black–white funding gaps".
The Lancet article is a related piece on racial disparities in grant funding that grew out of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Peer Review prize Lee and Erosheva won in 2014. In their study on Black-white funding gaps for NIH Project grants, they found that the overall award rate for Black applicants is 55% of that for white applicants, which leaves them to question: how can systems for allocating research grant funding be made more fair while improving their efficiency?
Some have argued that funding proposals by partial lottery eliminates or at least alleviates bias -- where winners are chosen randomly among applications that pass a round of peer review designed to cull the weakest proposals. Others have argued for funding proposals on the basis of bibliometric measures such as productivity and impact. Lee, Grant, and Erosheva argue that these processes may unintentionally perpetuate racial disparities by reflecting inequalities from preliminary and/or previous decisions and criteria.
You can read more about their piece here.