Latest research has revealed that gender-diverse teams result in novel, higher-impact scientific discoveries.
The study from the University of Notre Dame has examined about 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences over two decades and has found that while the team’s gender balance is under-recognized, it is still a powerful indicator of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.
The study called “Gender-diverse Teams Produce More Novel and Higher Impact Scientific Ideas” has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study said that having women in the team improved information-sharing processes like turn-taking. It added that women also offered perspectives on research questions that men did not possess and vice versa.
Lead author Yang Yang, assistant professor of information technology, analytics, and operations at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, has been quoted by EurekaAlert, as saying, “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.”
Carrying out systemic research about the performance of gender-diverse research teams in the medical sciences, the study looked into publications by 3.2 million women and 4.4 million men scientists covering about 15,000 medical science journals in the period 2000-2019.
Yang also added that the findings of the study will offer a head start by breaking down barriers and promoting gender-diverse teams.
