Mathias Wullum Nielsen

A global call for action to include gender in research impact assessment

Global investment in biomedical research has grown significantly over the last decades, reaching approximately a quarter of a trillion US dollars in 2010. However, not all of this investment is distributed evenly by gender. It follows, arguably, that scarce research resources may not be optimally invested (by either not supporting the best science or by failing to investigate topics that benefit women and men equitably). Women across the world tend to be significantly underrepresented in research both as researchers and research participants, receive less research funding, and appear less frequently than men as authors on research publications. There is also some evidence that women are relatively disadvantaged as the beneficiaries of research, in terms of its health, societal and economic impacts. Historical gender biases may have created a path dependency that means that the research system and the impacts of research are biased towards male researchers and male beneficiaries, making it inherently difficult (though not impossible) to eliminate gender bias. In this commentary, we – a group of scholars and practitioners from Africa, America, Asia and Europe – argue that gender-sensitive research impact assessment could become a force for good in moving science policy and practice towards gender equity. Research impact assessment is the multidisciplinary field of scientific inquiry that examines the research process to maximise scientific, societal and economic returns on investment in research. It encompasses many theoretical and methodological approaches that can be used to investigate gender bias and recommend actions for change to maximise research impact. We offer a set of recommendations to research funders, research institutions and research evaluators who conduct impact assessment on how to include and strengthen analysis of gender equity in research impact assessment and issue a global call for action.

Opinion: Gender diversity leads to better science

Pick up any recent policy paper on women’s participation in science and you will find assurances that gender diversity enhances knowledge outcomes. Universities and science-policy stakeholders, including the European Commission and the US National Institutes of Health, readily subscribe to this argument (1⇓–3). But is there, in fact, a gender-diversity dividend in science? The data suggest that there is. Under the right conditions, teams may benefit from various types of diversity, including scientific discipline, work experience, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. In this paper, we highlight gender diversity (Fig. 1). Guided by key research findings, we propose the following “mechanisms for innovation” specifying why gender diversity matters for scientific discovery and what managers should do to maximize its benefits (Fig. 2). Encouraging greater diversity is not only the right thing to do: it allows scientific organizations to derive an “innovation dividend” that leads to smarter, more creative teams, hence opening the door to new discoveries. Fig. 1. When it comes to science collaborations, there’s ample data to suggest that gender diversity pays a substantial research and productivity dividend. Image courtesy of Dave Cutler (artist). Well-run, well-performing research teams have become increasingly crucial to the success of modern scientific investigations. Already, experimental research points to positive links between gender diversity and collective problem solving. In a study of group performance, Anita Woolley et al. (4) randomly assigned 699 participants to teams of varying sizes and asked them to solve a set of both simple and complicated tasks (e.g., visual puzzles, brainstorming, making collective moral judgments, and negotiating over limited resources). Through these experiments, the authors found evidence of a collective intelligence factor that predicts group performance better than the IQ of individual group members. Key components of this factor include the group members’ social perceptiveness and parity in conversational turn-taking. Furthermore, … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: mwn{at}stanford.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Gender inequality and research performance: moving beyond individual-meritocratic explanations of academic advancement

Academic debates addressing the persistent gender gap in science reveal considerable contestation of the relevance and extent of the problem. Particular attention has been given to the question of whether womens high attrition rates should be ascribed to the structural and cultural barriers inherent to the academic system or instead individualistic matters, such as personal motivation, performance and merit. In order to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this particular issue, this cross-sectional bibliometric study investigates the link between gender and research performance in the Danish context. More specifically, it compares the citation and self-citation rates, source normalized impact per publication scores and collaborative patterns of 3293 male and female researchers at a Danish university and provides evidence challenging the widespread assumption of a persistent performance gap in favour of male researchers. The result has implications for research organizations and managers, as it raises concerns about the validity of individual-meritocratic explanations of the skewed gender distributions in academia.

Justifications of Gender Equality in Academia: Comparing Gender Equality Policies of Six Scandinavian Universities

Gender equality in academia is often perceived as receiving more emphasis in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. But how do the public research institutions in the three countries approach issues of gender equality differently? This study investigates how activities related to gender equality are articulated and justified in the policy statements of six Scandinavian universities. The analysis reveals some interesting disparities between the countries. In short, the Danish universities seem to be reluctant to deal with gender equality on the basis of rights-based assumptions. While the Norwegian and Swedish universities juxtapose arguments of utility, innovation, justice, and anti-discrimination, the Danish universities primarily refer to aspects of competitiveness, utility, and innovation when justifying activities on gender equality. The article suggests that the lack of justice-oriented perspectives in the Danish statements is an illustrative example of how neo-liberal managerial ideas about work-place productivity and creativity entail new and more instrumental approaches to gender equality issues in academia.

Gender consequences of a national performance-based funding model: new pieces in an old puzzle

This article investigates the extent to which the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator (BRI) reflects the performance of men and women differently. The model is based on a differentiated counting of peer-reviewed publications, awarding three and eight points for contributions to ‘well-regarded’ and highly selective journals and book publishers, and 1 and 5 points for equivalent scientific contributions via ‘normal level’ channels. On the basis of bibliometric data, the study shows that the BRI considerably widens the existing gender gap in researcher performance, since men on average receive more BRI points for their publications than women. The article suggests two probable explanations: (A) women merely comprise 24% of the committee members determining which publication channels to classify as ‘well-regarded’ and ‘normal’, which may lead to biases in the classification process. (B) The model privileges collaborative research, which disadvantages women due to gender differences in collaborative network relations.

One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis

Gender and sex analysis is increasingly recognized as a key factor in creating better medical research and health care1–7. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million medical research papers, our study examined the potential link between women’s participation in medical science and attention to gender-related and sex-related factors in disease-specific research. Adjusting for variations across countries, disease topics and medical research areas, we compared the participation of women authors in studies that do and do not involve gender and sex analysis. Overall, our results show a robust positive correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis. These findings corroborate discussions of how women’s participation in medical science links to research outcomes, and show the mutual benefits of promoting both the scientific advancement of women and the integration of gender and sex analysis into medical research.Nielsen and colleagues’ analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.

Scandinavian Approaches to Gender Equality in Academia: A Comparative Study

ABSTRACT This study investigates how Denmark, Norway, and Sweden approach issues of gender equality in research differently. Based on a comparative document analysis of gender equality activities in six Scandinavian universities, together with an examination of the legislative and political frameworks surrounding these activities, the article provides new insights into the respective strategies for governing and promoting the advancement of women researchers. In doing so, it exposes some interesting disparities among the cases and shows how Norwegian and Swedish gender equality activities revolve around a broader span of different approaches than the Danish. The study draws upon existing knowledge on the efficacy and implementation success of diversity policy programmes to gain a more profound understanding of implications of these differences.

Gender and citation impact in management research

This study investigates the extent to which a gender gap exists in the citation rates of management researchers. Based on a cross-sectional sample of 26,783 publications and 65,436 authorships, we illuminate possible differences in women’s and men’s average citation impact per paper, adjusting for covariation attributable to geographical setting, institutional reputation, self-citations, collaborative patterns and journal prestige. We find a marginal difference in citation impact in favor of women management scholars. Women are also slightly more likely than men to author articles among the top-10% most cited in their field. Yet given the sensitivity of our results to uncertainties in the data, these variations should not be overgeneralized. In the large picture, differences in citation rates appear to be a negligible factor in the reproduction of gender inequalities in management research.

Make academic job advertisements fair to all

Too many university posts are given to men without proper competition, says Mathias Wullum Nielsen.

Making gender diversity work for scientific discovery and innovation

Gender diversity has the potential to drive scientific discovery and innovation. Here, we distinguish three approaches to gender diversity: diversity in research teams, diversity in research methods and diversity in research questions. While gender diversity is commonly understood to refer only to the gender composition of research teams, fully realizing the potential of diversity for science and innovation also requires attention to the methods employed and questions raised in scientific knowledge-making. We provide a framework for understanding the best ways to support the three approaches to gender diversity across four interdependent domains — from research teams to the broader disciplines in which they are embedded to research organizations and ultimately to the different societies that shape them through specific gender norms and policies. Our analysis demonstrates that realizing the benefits of diversity for science requires careful management of these four interdependent domains.Increasing gender diversity can bring about substantial benefits for research and society. Nielsen et al. propose a framework for increased diversity not only in the composition of teams, but also in research methods and in the questions targeted by research.