Opinion: Gender diversity leads to better science
Opinion: Gender diversity leads to better science
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观点：性别多样性带来更好的科学
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
L. Schiebinger
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
M. W. Nielsen;Sharla N. Alegria;Love Börjeson;H. Etzkowitz;Holly J. Falk;Aparna Joshi;E. Leahey;Laurel Smith‐Doerr;A. Woolley;L. Schiebinger
随便拿起最近任何一份关于女性参与科学的政策文件，你都会发现性别多样性提高了知识成果的保证。包括欧盟委员会和美国国立卫生研究院在内的大学和科学政策利益相关者欣然同意这一观点。但事实上，科学领域是否存在性别多样性红利？
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.
Fig. 1.
When it comes to science collaborations, there’s ample data to suggest that gender diversity pays a substantial research and productivity dividend. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler (artist).
Well-run, well-performing research teams have become increasingly crucial to the success of modern scientific investigations. Already, experimental research points to positive links between gender diversity and collective problem solving. In a study of group performance, Anita Woolley et al. (4) randomly assigned 699 participants to teams of varying sizes and asked them to solve a set of both simple and complicated tasks (e.g., visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources). Through these experiments, the authors found evidence of a collective intelligence factor that predicts group performance better than the IQ of individual group members. Key components of this factor include the group members’ social perceptiveness and parity in conversational turn-taking. Furthermore, …
[↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: mwn{at}stanford.edu.
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