Thank you.
There is the adage, “If you can see her, you can be her.” I know that in many of the mentorship programs I participated in, that was part of it.
One of the things I know NSERC has done is to allow for extenuating circumstances to be indicated on a proposal so that you could indicate, for example, that you were on parental leave. When you compare research excellence in terms of metrics straight up—and this is one of my concerns with blinding—if we just look at total numbers, there are extenuating circumstances: somebody might have been on parental leave, for example, or maybe on multiple parental leaves.
Is it important that we continue to include those sorts of things in applications, even if we proceed with a blinding type of approach?