Gender-heterogeneous working groups produce higher quality science

Abstract

Here we present the first empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that a gender-heterogeneous problem-solving team generally produced journal articles perceived to be higher quality by peers than a team comprised of highly-performing individuals of the same gender. Although women were historically underrepresented as principal investigators of working groups, their frequency as PIs at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis is now comparable to the national frequencies in biology and they are now equally qualified, in terms of their impact on the accumulation of ecological knowledge (as measured by the h-index). While women continue to be underrepresented as working group participants, peer-reviewed publications with gender-heterogeneous authorship teams received 34% more citations than publications produced by gender-uniform authorship teams. This suggests that peers citing these publications perceive publications that also happen to have gender-heterogeneous authorship teams as higher quality than publications with gender uniform authorship teams. Promoting diversity not only promotes representation and fairness but may lead to higher quality science.

Figure 1. Temporal changes in A) the frequency of male and female principal investigators at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (men: white background, black dots; women: black background, white dots) and at US universities (men: white unpatterned; women:black unpatterned, data from NSF 1998, 2009) and B) their average (SE) h-index (men: grey circle; women: black square).

Figure 2. Differences in A) the frequency of female working group participants at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (black background, white dots) and in US universities (black, unpatterned, data from NSF 1998, 2009) over time and B) the average number of citations (SE) received by publications with or without female coauthors.