While female and minority science PhDs’ ideas are more novel they’re often overlooked

Women and non-white researchers offer science more original concepts but their contributions are less likely to be adopted by others or lead to academic positions, a new US study has found.

A ‘diversity paradox’ has been noted before: diversity breeds innovation, yet under-represented groups that diversify organisations have less successful careers within them. Now researchers from Stanford University show for the first time that the paradox holds for scientists as well.

A team led by Bas Hofstra and Daniel McFarland amassed data on around 1.2 million PhD recipients in the US between 1977 and 2015, following their careers into publishing and faculty positions. They used census and social security data to infer students’ gender and whether they belonged to minorities under-represented in science.

To measure novelty and innovation, the team used language processing techniques, such as machine learning and text analysis, to identify terms in PhD theses that represented ‘meaningful concepts’. Next, they identified when pairs of concepts were first related to one another. By adding up the number of these original, related ideas within each thesis, they developed a measure of novelty. The next stage was to calculate how much of this novel thinking had any impact. They measured how often a thesis’s new linked ideas were taken up in other documents.