Opinion: Gender diversity leads to better science Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Pick up any recent policy paper on women’s participation in science and you will find assurances that gender diversity enhances knowledge outcomes. Universities and science-policy stakeholders, including the European Commission and the US National Institutes of Health, readily subscribe to this argument (1–3). But is there, in fact, a gender-diversity dividend in science? The data suggest that there is. Under the right conditions, teams may benefit from various types of diversity, including scientific discipline, work experience, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. In this paper, we highlight gender diversity (Fig. 1). Guided by key research findings, we propose the following “mechanisms for innovation” specifying why gender diversity matters for scientific discovery and what managers should do to maximize its benefits (Fig. 2). Encouraging greater diversity is not only the right thing to do: it allows scientific organizations to derive an “innovation dividend” that leads to smarter, more creative teams, hence opening the door to new discoveries.

authors

  • Nielsen, Mathias Wullum
  • Alegria, Sharla
  • Börjeson, Love
  • Etzkowitz, Henry
  • Falk-Krzesinski, Holly J.
  • Joshi, Aparna
  • Leahey, Erin
  • Smith-Doerr, Laurel
  • Woolley, Anita Williams
  • Schiebinger, Londa

publication date

  • January 1, 2017