Team Gender Composition Impact on the Production of Disruptive Research

Abstract

This paper examines the disruptiveness of research produced by scientific teams with an emphasis on understanding how a team’s gender composition and team leader’s interdisciplinarity focus influence the way in which the research consolidates and destabilizes the knowledge trajectories to which they contribute. Drawing on new indicators of disruptiveness and transaction-level research expenditures data, I test disruptiveness effects using an expansive definition of a research team that considers all individuals who were paid on a grant associated with the principal investigator (PI). Insights from the sociology of science and prospect theory support the female-favoring-prospecting perspective. The female-favoring-prospecting perspective suggests that female PIs will be more likely to pursue exploratory projects that have greater potential to disrupt existing research streams. I test the study’s hypotheses using a sample of 3,758 scientific research teams in biomedicine that produced 32,655 papers between 2002-2013. UMETRICS data (Universities Measuring the EffecTs of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness, and Science) on the PIs and their teams, WoS (Web of Science) on scientific research publications and citations, and Scimago journal classifications are used. The analyses demonstrate female dominated teams had highest likelihood of disruption, while gender parity teams had lowest odds of disruption. Further, PIs with stronger histories of interdisciplinary research produced increasingly disruptive research when their teams were female dominated. The findings provide significant contribution to science of science and innovation policy.