Gender diversity and publication activity—an analysis of STEM in the UK

Abstract

Gender diversity in STEM remains a significant issue, as the field continues to be a male dominated one, despite increased attention on the subject. This article examines the interplay between gender diversity on projects funded by a major UK research council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the publication activity of a project, as measured by the average journal quality of project publication output, over a 10-year period. The proportion of female representation and leadership on these projects remains very low. For the projects examined as part of this study, over 70% of these projects have no female representation, and less than 15% have a female lead. This study does not find a significant relationship between gender diversity and journal quality output. This study highlights that an important avenue for future work is the development of alternative metrics to assess the performance of research projects in a discipline characterized by very low levels of gender diversity, to fully unpack the impact of project team gender diversity on project output activity.

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“…Yang et al 2023), often with enduring consequences (Hjerm & Danell 2013), which are further amplified by other structural inequities (Nash & Moore 2022;Yang et al 2023). Ultimately, gender biases impede the contribution of new knowledge to the scientific community when greater team diversity is linked to more novel and higher-impact research (Aloisi & Reid 2020;Sarabi & Smith 2023;Y. Yang et al 2022).…”

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“…Higher dropout rates, resulting in shorter academic careers, are common for women (Huang et al, 2020 ). While the share of female authors in scientific publications has increased over the last few decades (Huang et al, 2020 ; Sarabi and Smith, 2023 ), male authors still dominate the publishing landscape, and even when male and female authors have contributed equally to a publication (i.e., shared first authorship), it is more common to see the male author's name mentioned before the female author's (Broderick and Casadevall, 2019 ). Women are overall less likely to receive credit for their work than their male counterparts, as male researchers more often receive co-authorship than female researchers for similar tasks (Ross et al, 2022 ).…”

“…There is evidence that gender-diverse teams tend to produce research output with a higher degree of novelty and impact (Sarabi and Smith, 2023 ). While the reasons for this are still unclear, it is likely that the integration and empowerment of women (i.e., acknowledgment and incorporation of their expertise) rather than strict gender ratios are the keys to high-impact research (Love et al, 2022 ).…”