Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2200841119

Science’s changing demographics raise new questions about research team diversity and research outcomes. We study mixed-gender research teams, examining 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and establishing several core findings.

First, the fraction of publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly, yet mixed-gender teams continue to be underrepresented compared to the expectations of a null model. Second, 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. Third, the greater the gender balance on a team, the better the team scores on these performance measures. Fourth, these patterns generalize across medical subfields. Finally, the novelty and impact advantages seen with mixed-gender teams persist when considering numerous controls and potential related features, including fixed effects for the individual researchers, team structures, and network positioning, suggesting that a team’s gender balance is an underrecognized yet powerful correlate of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.

To measure a paper’s novelty, we followed prior literature and denote novel papers as those that combine knowledge in a new way relative to existing combinations. Because novelty is a broad concept, we used two different measures of a paper’s novelty from the literature (6, 34). The novelty measure used in our main results is based on ref. 6, which uses the journals referenced in a paper and examines whether given journal pairings are common or unusual. Specifically, the novelty measure quantifies the observed co-occurrence frequencies of all journal pairings in the literature prior to the publication year of the target paper. The observed co-occurrence of journal pairings in each paper is compared to a null model of what the pairing frequency would be if the journal pairings were combined by chance. Papers whose bibliographies contain journal pairings that have frequently occurred together in the past (more than expected by chance) indicate relatively conventional and familiar pairings of knowledge; by contrast, papers whose bibliographies contain journal pairings that happen less than expected by chance indicate novel combinations of knowledge (6).