Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556.
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems and Data Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Sep 6;119(36):e2200841119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2200841119. Epub 2022 Aug 29.
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.
科学领域的人口结构变化引发了新的问题，即研究团队的多样性与研究成果之间的关系。我们研究了男女混合的研究团队，考察了 2000 年以来发表在医学科学领域的 660 万篇论文，并得出了一些核心发现。首先，男女混合团队发表的论文比例增长迅速，但与零模型的预期相比，男女混合团队的代表性仍然不足。其次，尽管代表性不足，但与同等规模的同性团队相比，男女混合团队的出版物在新颖性和影响力方面都有显著提高。第三，团队的性别平衡程度越高，团队在这些绩效指标上的得分就越好。第四，这些模式在医学各子领域中普遍存在。最后，即使考虑到许多控制变量和潜在相关特征，包括对个别研究人员、团队结构和网络定位的固定效应，男女混合团队在新颖性和影响力方面的优势仍然存在，这表明团队的性别平衡是一个尚未被充分认识但却具有强大影响力的科学发现相关因素。
