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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Gender-diverse teams produce more novel, higher-impact scientific discoveries, study shows [nd.edu]:

The number of medical science publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly over the past two decades, but remains underrepresented compared to what would be expected by chance.

New research from the University of Notre Dame examines about 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and reveals that a team's gender balance is an under-recognized, yet powerful indicator of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.

[...] "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 Yang, who also studies how social networks and gender affect individuals' success [pnas.org]. "And the greater a team's gender balance, the better the performance."

The team finds that advantages of gender-diverse teams hold for small and large teams, all 45 subfields of medicine and women- or men-led teams, and generalize to published papers in all science fields over the last 20 years.

"Our findings reveal potentially new gender and teamwork synergies that correlate with scientific discoveries and inform diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives," Yang said.

The study states, "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."

Author summary video [youtu.be]

Journal Reference:
Yang Yang, Tanya Y. Tian, et al., Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas [open], PNAS, 119, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2200841119 [doi.org]

Original Submission