Project Decision Q

Abstract
Intergender collaboration is becoming increasingly common in academia. However, the

impact of team gender structures on innovation remains unknown. Using data from the
American Physical Society, this study applies the disruption index to measure the
relationship between gender composition and innovation performance. The results show
that compared with single-gender teams, moderate inter-gender collaboration has a
greater potential to produce disruptive knowledge and must be adopted by scientific
teams. Specifically, the types of innovation in mixed-gender teams are affected by the
gender composition. If the proportion of female scholars and their participation increase
in a mixed-gender team, it can positively contribute to disruptive performance. If female
scientists are placed on a male-dominated team, they may function as consolidation
representatives. The robustness results indicate that the conclusions also apply to male
scientists. The results suggest that males and females have no significant physiological
differences in innovation and that the key is to find a gender balance in collaboration.
Based on the theories of similarity-attraction and cognitive diversity, the reasons for the
differences between female and male scientists may be team atmosphere and their
roles in collaboration. This study can serve as a reference for policymakers and funders
when building teams to achieve disruptive discoveries.
Introduction
There are two types of knowledge production. First, new achievements can be made
based on current knowledge from predecessors and current scientific paradigms,
thereby consolidating the extant knowledge system. The second type disrupts such a
system by creating new research topics, methods, and perspectives, thus bringing more
challenges and uncertainties to the current scientific paradigms and knowledge (Kuhn,
1962). Both types of knowledge production are considered innovative.
With the development of scientific methodologies and advancements in computer-

assisted analysis technologies, these two types of innovations can now be quantified
through scientists’ academic publications (Abramo, D'Angelo & Di Costa, 2015;
Mohammadi & Karami, 2022; Sadabadi, Ramezani, Fartash & Nikijoo, 2022).
Knowledge innovation processes and outcomes have been evaluated by using various
indicators based on bibliometric methods, such as citation counts (Hirsch, 2007; Martin-
Martin, Orduna-Malea, Thelwall & Lopez-Cozar, 2018), altmetrics (Bornmann, 2014;
Costas, Zahedi & Wouters, 2015), long-term scientific impact (D. S. Wang, Song &
Barabasi, 2013), novelty discovery (Uzzi, Mukherjee, Stringer & Jones, 2013), and
disruption index (D index). D index, which was proposed by Wu, Wang and Evans
(2019) as an optimisation of the former indicator, the CD index, proposed by Funk and
Owen-Smith (2017), has been applied to evaluate innovation processes, especially in
academia. The main idea of this index is to identify publications that show high potential
to disrupt, revolutionise, and break current knowledge systems by analysing the
scientific citation network. D index classifies publications into two innovation types:
consolidating and disrupting current knowledge systems.
The increasing demand for cutting-edge scientific knowledge has led to increased
research collaboration, which is essential for scientists struggling to innovate and
enhance their impact. Subsequently, team science has attracted widespread attention
(Lu, Ren, Huang, Bu & Zhang, 2021; Xu, Wu & Evans, 2022). Scientists may face
numerous challenges while embarking on the road of exploration, whereas collaboration
can reduce the various costs of such an endeavour (Tripodi, Chiaromonte & Lillo, 2020).
The effectiveness and performance of scientific collaboration can be influenced by
multiple factors, among which gender issues have been widely discussed. Intergender
collaboration is an important means of helping women seize opportunities to participate
in scientific development (Huang, Gates, Sinatra & Barabasi, 2020; Kwiek & Roszka,
2021). The information-processing approach and cognitive diversity theory argue that
individuals perform better in a diverse group than in a homogeneous team as it
facilitates interaction with individuals having heterogeneous backgrounds, networks,
information, and skills. The diversity of information may promote group outcomes
despite the possibility of coordination problems. For instance, males and females differ
in R&D efficiency (Kou et al., 2020), writing style (Ma, Teng, Deng, Liu & Zhang, 2023),
and self-citation (Dion, Mitchell & Sumner, 2020). Therefore, collaboration across
genders can improve team performance.
Although the share and chances of female participation in scientific research and
academic collaboration have greatly improved over the past decades, especially in
STEM-related disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) (Shen,
Cheng, Ju & Xie, 2022), discrimination continues to be a problem (Huang et al., 2020).
The gender gap in academia persists and is even widening (Nielsen, 2017). Compared
with their male peers, female scientists experience shorter academic careers (Huang et
al., 2020), their productivity is more likely to be exposed to vulnerable situations
(Abramo, D'Angelo & Mele, 2023; Liu et al., 2022; Mayer & Rathmann, 2018), and their
collaborative relationships are weaker (Sandstrom & van den Besselaar, 2019; Shen,
Xie, Ao & Cheng, 2022). Articles of female scientists may also receive fewer citations
and fewer publication chances than those of male scientists (Meho, 2021; Sarabi &
Smith, 2023; Shang, Sivertsen, Cao & Zhang, 2022; Shen, Cheng et al., 2022; Thelwall,
2018). Against this background, this study determines whether gender gaps exist in
innovative processes. Moreover, the innovative role of female scientists in collaboration
was examined, and the innovation status of males and females was described using a
quantitative method.
However, these performance advantages do not necessarily reflect innovation

advantages. Related research on team science has focused on the relationship
between gender composition and team productivity, research quality, and academic
impact, but has not considered its influence on the scientific paradigm and knowledge
system. Although the number of members and team atmosphere have been proven to
affect innovation preferences in previous observational studies (Lyu, Gong, Ruan,
Cheng & Li, 2021; Wu et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2022), most policymakers and funders may
still require considerable knowledge support on collaborative decisions and to provide
grantees of receiving temporary acknowledgement from academic communities along
with leaving a long-term effect on scientific systems (Nielsen et al., 2017; Thelwall et al.,
2023; Xu et al., 2022). In summary, a knowledge gap remains as to whether the gender
composition of an academic team can transform its work into different types of
innovation. Consequently, the authors attempt to confirm the relationship between a
team's gender composition and its disruptive actions.
This study investigates two research questions: (1) How does the female ratio in a team
influence its publication's disruptive performance? (2) How does the female contribution
in a team influence its publication's disruptive performance?
This study aims to answer these two questions, address the abovementioned gap,
discover the laws of innovation preferences behind inter-gender collaboration, suggest
guidance for related policymakers and stakeholders, contribute evidence to narrow the
gender gap and break stereotypes, and serve as an instructive reference for scientists
to conduct inter-gender collaborations.
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Section snippets
Gender gap in STEM
Males and females have physiological differences, especially in cognitive thinking,
which may disturb their performance as scientists in academic research (Duch et al.,
2012). Consequently, gender issues have attracted considerable attention in the
management sciences. For example, female scholars publish less articles than their
male counterparts (Kaufman & Chevan, 2011; Li, Aste, Caccioli & Livan, 2019;
Mairesse & Pezzoni, 2015; Sotudeh & Khoshian, 2014) and the possible reasons are
Data and method

Fig. 1 outlines the research methodology.
Gender in groups
Fig. 4 presents a comparison of the three groups in terms of the distribution of the
disruption index and team size using boxplot visualisation. Approximately 25–75 % of
the nodes were distributed in the box, and the median line, mean value, and outliers of
the three groups are shown in the figure. Mixed-gender teams have greater potential to
produce disruptive publications than all-male or all-female teams. Mixed-gender teams
also preferred consolidative publications over the other two groups.
Conclusion
This study accesses data from APS and applies Python 3.11 for processing and
analysis. The authors attempt to understand how gender composition influences the
process and outcomes of innovation. Therefore, the disruption index was used to
explore the relationship between gender composition, represented by the female ratio
and female contributions. These two variables were used to describe the gender
composition of the research team in terms of quantity and quality. Moreover, the authors
hope to

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Abstract

Intergender collaboration is becoming increasingly common in academia. However, the

With the development of scientific methodologies and advancements in computer-

However, these performance advantages do not necessarily reflect innovation

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Data and method

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