The Effect of Gender Diversity on Scientific Team Impact: A Team Roles Perspective
This research addresses the inconsistent findings on gender diversity's effect on team success in academia, focusing on role differentiation to provide nuanced insights for scientific collaboration and policy.
The study investigated how gender diversity in leadership and support roles affects scientific team impact, measured by five-year citation counts, using over 130,000 papers from PLOS journals. It found that gender diversity has an inverted U-shaped relationship with impact for both roles, with all-female leadership and all-male support teams achieving higher impact, and effects vary by team size.
The influence of gender diversity on the success of scientific teams is of great interest to academia. However, prior findings remain inconsistent, and most studies operationalize diversity in aggregate terms, overlooking internal role differentiation. This limitation obscures a more nuanced understanding of how gender diversity shapes team impact. In particular, the effect of gender diversity across different team roles remains poorly understood. To this end, we define a scientific team as all coauthors of a paper and measure team impact through five-year citation counts. Using author contribution statements, we classified members into leadership and support roles. Drawing on more than 130,000 papers from PLOS journals, most of which are in biomedical-related disciplines, we employed multivariable regression to examine the association between gender diversity in these roles and team impact. Furthermore, we apply a threshold regression model to investigate how team size moderates this relationship. The results show that (1) the relationship between gender diversity and team impact follows an inverted U-shape for both leadership and support groups; (2) teams with an all-female leadership group and an all-male support group achieve higher impact than other team types. Interestingly, (3) the effect of leadership-group gender diversity is significantly negative for small teams but becomes positive and statistically insignificant in large teams. In contrast, the estimates for support-group gender diversity remain significant and positive, regardless of team size.