Thank you for the question. It's a very important one.
If you look across the pipeline, doctoral fellows, post-doctoral fellows, new investigators who are women are less likely to get grants. It is required for you to get success at those early stages in order to get success later. That, in part, is based on the gender distribution among the disciplines. Women are more likely to be in the social sciences. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada gets less money than the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
There is a lot of data that has been gathered to show that women in the peer-review process are penalized. Their grants are more likely to be smaller, and they're more likely to be of shorter duration, which makes it very difficult to sustain careers and sustain research teams, which help fuel productivity.
Yes, there are systemic challenges across the board.