Gender Equality in Gambling Student Funding: A Brief Report

Abstract

Acknowledgement of gender disparity in academia has been made in recent years, as have efforts to reduce this inequality. These efforts will be undermined if insufficient numbers of women qualify and are competitive for academic careers. The gender ratio at each graduate degree level has been examined in some studies, with findings suggesting that women’s representation has increased, and in some recent cases, achieved equality. These findings are promising as they could indicate that more women will soon qualify for early-career academic positions. Most of these studies, however, examine a specific—or narrow subset—of academic disciplines. Therefore, it remains unclear if these findings generalize across disciplines. Gambling researchers, and the graduate students they supervise, are a uniquely heterogeneous group representing multiple academic disciplines including health sciences, math, law, psychology, and sociology, among many more. Thus, gambling student researchers are a group who can be examined for gender equality at postgraduate levels, while reducing the impact of discipline specificity evident in previous investigations. The current study examined graduate-level scholarships from one Canadian funding agency (Alberta Gambling Research Institute), awarded from 2009 through 2019, for gender parity independent of academic discipline.