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

Abstract

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.

Keywords: computational social science; gender inequality; innovation; team science.

Fig. 1.

The underrepresentation of gender-diverse teams. (A) The sharp upward trend of women’s participation in medical research over the last 20 y. (B) The share of different team sizes by year over the same period. The major change is that large teams of six or more researchers per paper have supplanted teams of smaller sizes with the largest drop in solo authorship and two-person teams. C and D show that the share of publications from mixed-gender teams has steadily increased with time. Nonetheless, E and F indicate that mixed-gender teams are significantly underrepresented in medical science (no CIs cross the 0.00 difference line) by up to 17% depending on the team size when we measure team gender diversity using the Shannon entropy (SI Appendix, section 1.2.5).

Fig. 2.

Mixed-gender teams produce more novel and highly cited research publications. (A) Mixed-gender teams are more likely to produce novel papers than same-gender teams at all team sizes. Teams of six or more authors are 9.1% more likely to publish novel work than the base rate. (B) Mixed-gender teams are more likely to publish an upper-tail paper than same-gender teams by as much as 14.6%, depending on team sizes. (C and D) The performance benefits of gender diversity generalize across 45 medical subfields. Medical subfields are arranged from left to right according to the number of publications in the subfields (largest to smallest) with statistically significant relationships for novelty and impact becoming noisier for smaller medical subfields. Dark-green coloring indicates significant coefficients (P value <0.05), while light-green coloring indicates nonsignificant coefficients.

Fig. 3.

Mixed-gender teams and research outcomes controlling for numerous factors. (A and B) The regression coefficient and 95% CIs for mixed-gender teams in predicting novelty (A) and citation impact (B) while controlling for the features indicated in the panel headings. The leftmost panels indicate the coefficients of mixed-gender team in baseline regressions. The rightmost panels indicate the coefficients of mixed-gender team after controlling collectively for expertise diversity, network structure, career age diversity, and international diversity.