In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
The Diversity-Innovation Paradox in Science
Bas Hofstra, Vivek V. Kulkarni, Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez, Bryan He, Dan Jurafsky, & Daniel A. McFarland
Summary
Diversity breeds innovation and innovation is argued to facilitate careers. Yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. We set out to identify the diversity-innovation paradox in science and explain why it arises. By analyzing data from nearly all US PhD-recipients and their dissertations across three decades, we find demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions. The discounting of minorities’ innovations may partly explain their underrepresentation in influential positions of academia.
What are scientific innovations?
Innovations are new re-combinations of scientific terminology. Below an example of a scientific novelty. We observe, for instance, the first PhD-recipient to write about the (now taken-for-granted) link between HIV and non-human primates in U.S. PhD theses. Other scholars then adopted that idea moving forward.
Who innovates?
We find that women, non-White, and those who are gender or racially underrepresented scholars in their field innovate at higher rates than men, white, and majority scholars.
Who reaps the benefits of innovating?
The rate of innovation positively corresponds with successful academic careers. Yet, the "innovation payoff" to academic careers is lower for gender and racially underrepresented groups. At low levels of innovation, chances for scholarly careers are similar across groups, but at higher levels of innovation, underrepresented groups' scientific careers are advanced less than that of majority groups (see figure to the right). To give some sense of the magnitude of devaluation: two standard deviations from the median level of impactful innovation, the relative difference in becoming research faculty between gender underrepresented compared to gender overrepresented scholars increases to about 15%.
Whose innovations are used?
Women, non-White, and gender and racially underrepresented scholars' innovations are used at slightly lower rates. So individuals who diversify organizations innovate and have new ideas, but their innovations and ideas are devalued. This devaluation is partly explained by underrepresented genders in fields who innovate by bringing more distal ideas together in less obvious ways.
