Granting Inequities: Racialization and Gender Differences in Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Grant Amounts for Research Elites

This paper explores inequities in the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) grant amounts awarded to successful applicants in Canada's universities. Specifically, the study seeks to discern whether ethnicity and gender matter for amounts of SSHRCC's award decisions using compiled SSHRCC data and names of successful grant applicants to generate a large sample from 1998 to 2018. Although the importance of ethnicity along with gender and region, as well as institutional factors such as discipline and status of an applicant's university are explored in relation to higher education institutions' applicants, our focus is on effects of racialization on SSHRCC's decisions. We find that several factors affect the amount of grants awarded and that racialized applicants, especially men, have tended to receive less funding than non-racialized applicants over this period. In addition, on the one hand, the grant amount for racialized minorities has decreased in recent years. On the other hand, racialized women applicants received higher grant amounts than their counterparts, and particularly in recent years. Conceptual, empirical, methodological, and policy implications of these findings are discussed.