Partnership research isn't only a STEM story: Reflecting on the latest ARC Linkage results
Outside opinion | June 2026
The recent Australian Research Council announcement of the Linkage Projects 2025 Round 2 results in May showed that more than $99.8 million was funded across 178 collaborative projects, all framed around the National Science Priorities of a healthy society, resilient and productive ecosystems, transformative technologies. It's a big number attached to a scheme that, in the public imagination tends to conjure up images of an engineering lab, a commercial R&D partner, a prototype ‘widget’ headed for market.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
In a surprising and welcome departure from the usual trend, the majority of the funded projects Outside Opinion supported this round were in the humanities and social sciences, and each one of those was led by a woman. We don't want to make too much of a single round's results, however they’ve taken us down a path of thinking more deeply about who tends to lead partnership-funded research, in which fields, and why the answer is narrower than it should be.
Assumptions about Linkage
Linkage is an industry-partnership scheme, and "industry" has traditionally been understood to be the domain of the STEM disciplines. This comes with significant opportunity cost when HASS researchers choose to opt out of a scheme they might actually be well suited to. A Partner Organisation can be a government department, a cultural institution, a museum, gallery, library or archive, a health service, a peak body, a community organisation, a regulator. The "transfer of skills, knowledge and ideas" the ARC describes is exactly what a social scientist does when they work with a state agency on policy design, or a historian does with a national collecting institution, or an education researcher does with a school system. The partnership model isn't a STEM artefact that HASS has to contort itself to fit. It simply describes how a great deal of humanities and social science research already works.
So what about gender?
The Australian data on gender and research funding is consistent on one point that often gets lost: fewer ARC grants are led by women than by men, but once women lead an application, their success rate is broadly comparable — recent analysis puts women-led success at around 23% against roughly 24% for men[1], with no meaningful difference in funding awarded per grant. The gap in total funding to women is because fewer applications are led by women in the first place. In other words, the problem sits upstream of the assessment panel.
It’s accepted knowledge that women are generally better represented in HASS-aligned disciplines — studies in human society, language and culture, education, psychology — and underrepresented in physical sciences, engineering, mathematics and computing. So the fields where women are most concentrated overlap heavily with the fields most likely to assume a partnership scheme "isn't for them."
A cluster of women-led HASS projects succeeding in Linkage isn't notable because it's surprising that they'd win, when the evidence says they win at the same rate as anyone else. It's notable because it's visible proof of a pathway that too few people in those fields believe is open to them.
What we take from it
While it looks unlikely that the Linkage program itself will continue into the future, collaborative research is expected to be a key feature of changes to come, flagged through both the ‘Ambitious Australia’ report on the Strategic Examination of Research and Development, and the ARC’s National Competitive Grants Program revamp.
For HASS researchers weighing whether collaborating with ‘industry’ is worth the effort: it is, and the partner you need is more likely already in your network than you think, for example the agency you've advised, the institution that holds the collection you study, the service whose practice your research could reshape.
For research offices: the gap this round illustrates is one you can take active steps to close. Who in your humanities and social science cohorts is being actively encouraged toward partnership funding, and what support do they most need? Where the barrier is the belief that the scheme isn't a fit, the intervention is early and it's about framing.
For us, it's a reminder of how our developmental approach really adds value. We cover the full project lifecycle from ideation through to execution, in partnership with research offices, Faculty or School leadership teams, and willing researchers with vision.
Prof Kristy Hess, from Deakin University, whose successful Linkage was part of this year’s cohort, wrote: “this is my third successful Linkage grant that I've led and each time I've had Outside Opinion give me valuable advice. I wouldn't write a grant application without getting this external feedback. Having someone from an outside discipline review a proposal and meaningfully read and engage with it, is so important”.
The successful humanities and social science projects we backed this round shared a shape: a researcher with deep expertise, a partner with a real problem, and a piece of work neither could have produced alone.
These will be key features and requirements of all collaborative/industry-partnered research going forward, and OO is well placed to assist.
Outside Opinion works with researchers and research offices across the National Competitive Grants Program. If you're a humanities or social science researcher who has written off industry-partnered research, please reach out for a chat.
[1] The 23% versus 24% comparison is drawn from an international review of grant outcomes cited in I. Kingsley et al., “Fewer women receive research grants — but the reasons are more complicated than you’d think,” The Conversation, 23 May 2023, https://theconversation.com/fewer-women-receive-research-grants-but-the-reasons-are-more-complicated-than-youd-think-205649. The finding that Australian women-led and men-led grants receive equal funding per grant is from I. Kingsley, E. Slavich, L. Harvey-Smith, E. L. Johnston and L. A. Williams, “Gender differences in Australian research grant awards, applications, amounts, and workforce participation,” Science and Public Policy, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scaf012.
