Story at a glance
- Historically, women researchers’ work has been undervalued and underrepresented in scientific and medical communities.
- New research details the pitfalls of this trend, as more gender-balanced research teams produce more impactful and novel ideas.
- The findings underscore the importance of gender representation when conducting scientific research.
Researchers in the scientific and medical community strive to produce novel and impactful breakthroughs with their work. One way to improve these efforts is to work in teams with a balanced number of men and women, according to a new study.
Historically, women’s research contributions have been underrepresented, prompting the creation of organizations like the Association for Women in Science. Previous studies have also detailed gender disparities in professional conference appearances and authorship credit in scientific articles.
To highlight the importance of diverse gender contributions in the medical sciences, a team of researchers from Michigan State University, Northwestern University, New York University and the University of Notre Dame assessed 6.6 million papers published by mixed-gender research teams since the year 2000.
Although there has been a rapid growth in gender-diverse teams throughout that time, these teams continue to be underrepresented, authors wrote, as teams still tend to have more males and fewer females.
But, “despite their underrepresentation, the publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equivalent size,” they added. The finding was consistent regardless of medical subfield, or whether the team was led by a man or woman.
Specifically, teams with six or more people and an equal or close number of men and women were almost 10 percent more likely to publish novel work and nearly 15 percent more likely to be among the most-cited papers, compared with unbalanced teams.
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Researchers also found that the greater the balance of gender on a research team, the more likely that team would produce superior research, based on the factors assessed. However, they were unable to account for nonbinary authors in the current study.
“This work quantifies the impact that diversity has on academic achievement,” said study co-author Teresa K. Woodruff, provost of Michigan State University, in a press release.
“The more diverse the environment, the better the outcome for those who fund the research and those in whose interest the work is done.”
In the past 10 years, women’s participation in the medical sciences has exceeded that of men when it comes to graduate and postdoctoral research training, authors wrote. The results not only help recognize women’s contributions to science and the benefits of women and men working together, but also highlight how these practices improve science as a whole.
“Chances are, if we had more mixed-gender teams working on pressing issues, we’d have faster breakthroughs,” added co-author Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University.
Researchers defined novelty as the degree to which papers combined existing ideas in innovative ways, and impact was defined by the total number of paper citations. Analyses also suggested the findings could be generalizable to fields outside of medicine.
“We all believe that diversity increases impact, and this new paper proves that statement, here through the lens of gender and scientific productivity,” Woodruff said.
The research is the first of its kind to quantify the benefits of mixed-gender teams, while authors hypothesize nuanced approaches to problem solving informed by personal experience and an equity lens could account for these benefits.
Published on Sep 12,2022