The Effect of Gender Diversity on Scientific Team Impact: A Team Roles Perspective

TL;DR

This study investigates how gender diversity within different roles of scientific teams affects their impact, revealing nuanced effects moderated by team size and role, with implications for team composition strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a role-based analysis of gender diversity's impact on scientific team success, using a large dataset and advanced regression models to uncover complex relationships.

Findings

Inverted U-shaped relationship between gender diversity and impact.

All-female leadership and all-male support teams achieve higher impact.

Leadership gender diversity effects vary with team size.

Abstract

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.