Key Points:
- Publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equal size.
- The finding holds true regardless of variables, and extends to all scientific and medical disciplines.
- Although significant strides have been made, gender-diverse teams are still under-represented.
Based on an examination of almost 7 million published papers, scientific teams that include female authors produce higher-impact discoveries.
Conducting the first large-scale systemic investigation of the performance of gender-diverse research teams in the medical sciences, researchers from the University of Notre Dame analyzed research publications by 3.2 million women and 4.4 million men scientists in more than 15,000 medical science journals from 2000 to 2019. Authors in all positions were included.
“We find the publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equal size,” said lead author Yang Yang, assistant professor of information technology, analytics and operations. “And the greater a team’s gender balance, the better the performance.”
That finding held true in different circumstances, as well. For example, the advantages of including female scientists were evident in small and large teams, all 45 subfields of medicine and women- or men-led teams, and even generalize to published papers in all science fields over the last 20 years.
“Laboratory experiments suggest that women on a team improve information-sharing processes on teams, such as turn taking. It might also be that women provide a perspective on research questions that men do not possess and vice versa,” reads the study, published in PNAS.
In medicine, women’s participation rates have reached the same level of men’s over the last decade. However, gender inequalities still exist in science, especially in grants and prizes. Since gender-diverse teams are still under-represented in medical science, Yang says his study may help speed breakthroughs by breaking down barriers to the formation of gender-diverse teams.
“Given the noncausal nature of our study, we are conservative in speculating on the theoretical mechanisms, but the richer descriptive findings in such a large-scale dataset are informative and point to a potentially transformative approach for thinking about and capturing the value of gender diversity in science,” concluded Yang.
Information courtesy of Notre Dame.