I t is often argued that the presence of stakeholders in review panels may improve the selection of societal relevant research projects. In this paper, we investigate whether the composition of panels indeed matters. More precisely, when stakeholders are in the panel, does that result in more positive evaluation of proposals of relevance to that stakeholder? We investigate thisfor the gender issues domain, and show that this is the case. When stakeholders are present, the relevant projects obtain a more positive evaluation and consequently a higher score. If these findingscan be generalised, they are an important insight for the creation of pathways to and conditions for impact.