acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM Careers

Gender-Diverse Teams Produce More Novel, Higher-Impact Research, Study Shows


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
gender-diverse team in discussions

The advantages of mixed-gender teams persist when considering effects for individual researchers, team structures, and network positioning.

Credit: iStock

A research team's gender balance is an under-recognized, yet powerful indicator of novel and impactful scientific discoveries, according to an examination of about 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000.

"We find the publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equal size," says Yang Yang, assistant professor of information technology, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame, and lead author of the published study. "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.

From University of Notre Dame
View Full Article


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account