Is inclusive science better science? (Finance DG)

Project Member(s): Xu, J.

Funding or Partner Organisation: Partnership Foundation Paris-Dauphine
Partnership Foundation Paris-Dauphine

Start year: 2022

Summary: We propose to examine whether changing women’s representation in science changes science. Recent calls to improve diversity in science focus on issues of fairness. Card et al. (2020) suggest that women face higher standards when publishing papers in economics. Adams and Lowry (2022) document that female finance academics report more experiences of discrimination than men and show that these experiences help explain why women have lower satisfaction with finance academia than men. Huang et al. (2020) document that women publish fewer papers than men. What the literature has not yet acknowledged is that a lack of fairness may be detrimental to science. In theory, greater diversity among scientists should be associated with a greater diversity of scientific ideas and greater impact (Nielsen et al., 2017b, Uzzi et al., 2013). However, this link may be broken if professional culture imposes a constraint on the production of knowledge by women. We propose to test the link between diversity among scientists and the diversity and impact of science by examining topics and citation patterns of scientific papers. Specifically, we ask: (1) are fields with more women more diverse in topics and citations? (2) is the link between diversity among scientists and diversity/impact of science moderated by measures of field-specific and country-specific culture. We expect the answers to these questions to have important implications for how universities, professional associations in science and research funding agencies approach discussions about diversity.

FOR Codes: Applied economics, Gender and sexualities, Technological and organisational innovation