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Fellowship schemes by Australian funding agencies invite researchers to disclose personal career disruptions to promote equity. For applicants living with illness or disability, this well-meaning policy can expose private medical details to non-medically trained reviewers and create new risks of bias. A proposed reform could bring medical privacy and consistency back into the process.
Imagine you’re a clinician-researcher diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Between patient care, research deadlines and departmental responsibilities, you also manage flares, fatigue, and frequent specialist visits. Years later, you apply for a fellowship to support your clinical research. The application includes a question about career disruption – a welcome gesture toward equity and a chance to explain the gaps in your CV – however answering it means disclosing your SLE circumstances and personal impact to an unknown group of peer reviewers, many of whom are not medically trained.
This scenario is familiar in Australia’s research landscape. Funding agencies like the NHMRC, ARC and MRFF invite applicants to outline personal career circumstances and disruptions that may have affected their track record. The aim is to ensure greater equity, and this change has been critical to its improvement. However, the policy design raises concerns about medical privacy, fairness and effectiveness.
The problems came into sharp focus in 2021, when Professor Justin Yerbury – a Motor Neuron Disease (MND) researcher who later died from the disease – legally challenged the NHMRC’s Relative to Opportunity policy because the system was unfair to applicants with permanent disabilities. His advocacy prompted the NHMRC to revise their policy, clarifying that reviewers should consider the impact of disability on an applicant’s research achievements to date.
Whilst this was an important improvement, problems remain. Researchers with a disability write their disclosures for peer reviewers who may be, for example, economists or statisticians. Without clinical understanding, how can reviewers fairly evaluate the effect of illness or disability on a researcher’s career? Researchers living with chronic disease are still disadvantaged and the policies remain vulnerable to further legal challenges.
The problem in focus
A big concern for researchers with an illness or disability is privacy. Australia’s research communities are relatively small and hence tightly connected. Disclosures will extend beyond anonymous reviewers: they’re seen by peers – mostly research scientists or clinician-scientists – and by staff in the research office who help the applicant submit their proposal. Verification of a researchers’ career disruption is usually signed off by senior staff, who may also be involved in the researcher’s promotion or performance decisions, discouraging frank disclosure. Furthermore, research offices will have a potential conflict of interest as their key KPIs will include research funding.
Applicants are asked to describe sensitive issues (eg, a child’s terminal cancer diagnosis, relocation due to domestic violence) to people with no clear duty of confidentiality, in the ‘career narrative’ or ‘career context’ of Australian funding applications. Given the small number of researchers in some fields, it is possible that a reviewer might soon assess the same applicant for a job application, putting the reviewer in a difficult position and potentially disadvantaging the applicant.
Many reviewers will be unqualified to interpret medical information. We scanned 50 randomly selected ARC College of Experts members and none held a medical degree. Yet these reviewers routinely assess disruption claims involving complex health conditions, mental illness, and trauma. A broken femur and a stillborn baby may both result in “three months off work”, but their clinical and emotional impacts are vastly different. Expecting historians, physicists or geologists to make these distinctions is both unrealistic and unfair. Reviewers might resort to online health information to gauge the impact of a medical condition – a practice that can be misleading.
The current system can fail both those who disclose and those who don’t. For example, disclosing a child with a complex disability is likely to harm a researcher’s success rate. Conversely, withholding personal information for privacy reasons can still lead to negative reviews when gaps in a researcher’s productivity are judged without context. In a 2021 survey, 13% of researchers reported a disruption they chose not to disclose, often for fear it would harm their chances of winning because it made them look “weak”.
A potential solution
We propose a fairer process that maintains privacy, ensures consistency, and acknowledges the complexity of life disruptions.
Career circumstances statements would be reviewed by an independent sociomedical impact panel – not conflicted university staff or peer reviewers. The panel would comprise specialist doctors, psychologists and other disability experts. The panel would assign a standardised impact score, eg “six months equivalent disruption in the past five years”. That score would then be applied as a multiplier, to adjust the scientific score. The scientists would evaluate the research only and would not need to assess any medical information.
Applicants who needed to disclose career disruptions would first select from standardised categories, eg, carer responsibilities, health, psychosocial challenges. They could then upload supporting documents (eg, medical certificates). This would enable the efficient processing of straightforward claims, including the common disruption of time off after the birth of a baby.
If necessary, the applicant would then submit a statutory declaration, listing qualified individuals (eg, a physician, psychologist, social worker, or lawyer) who can verify their claim if required. This clause is key: it avoids excessive burden while allowing verification in complex cases.
This approach offers multiple benefits: privacy protection, medical rigour, consistent adjustments, and reduced conflicts and workload on university staff and peer reviewers. Other parts of the employment system that rely on health assessments would use doctors. Given that research funding can be millions of dollars in salary and a secure career for the next five years – eg, an NHMRC Level 3 Investigator Grant alone is worth over $3 million – the importance of qualified medical advice is clear.
Critics may argue this process will add red tape and would delay decisions, but the sociomedical panel could be run in tandem with the scientific peer review. Current systems often act as hostile obstacle courses, especially for women and carers. Anecdotally, male researchers are also often reluctant to disclose genuine disruptions – a predictable response to a system that doesn’t protect privacy. Adding structure is one path to equity.
The impact
No system to judge complex life disruptions will be perfect. But the one we have now is potentially discriminatory. It discourages disclosure, conflicts research staff and burdens scientific reviewers with tasks outside their expertise, and risks excluding researchers whose lives have been interrupted by illness, trauma or care.
The current Relative to Opportunity policies were intended to create fairness. But in practice, they are often misunderstood, inconsistently applied, and fail to provide a safe mechanism for disclosure. It is now time that equity policies consider these critical aspects.
Associate Professor Nathalie Bock is a Researcher in Biomedical Technologies at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in the School of Biomedical Sciences.
Professor Adrian Barnett is a Researcher in Health and Medicine in the School of Public Health and Social Work at QUT and a member of the Research Council of the National Health and Medical Research Council. All opinions expressed are the personal views of the authors.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The statements or opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the AMA, the MJA or InSight+ unless so stated.
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