How does gender diversity shape history research?

Researchers are using big data to determine the potential impact of demographic diversity on new knowledge in the field of history.

Diverse teams are often associated with rapid discovery, yet few studies have examined whether and to what extent diversity in demographics, such as an individual’s gender and race, leads to new ideas and knowledge. “These questions are part of a longstanding discussion in the research community concerning who creates knowledge and the knowledge produced,” says Londa Schiebinger, professor of history of science at Stanford University.

Schiebinger and her colleagues’ latest work in this arena, published in PLOS ONE, used big data and computer modeling to map how women and men have contributed to developments and breakthroughs in the field of history over time between the years 1950-2015.

(Credit: Risi S, Nielsen MW, Kerr E, Brady E, Kim L, et al. (2022) Diversifying history: A large-scale analysis of changes in researcher demographics and scholarly agendas. PLOS ONE 17(1): e0262027.)

Here, two of the paper’s nine coauthors, senior author Schiebinger, who is also director of Stanford’s Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project, and Mathias W. Nielsen, formerly a Gendered Innovations postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, now an associate professor of the sociology of science at the University of Copenhagen, discuss the study and how increased gender diversity in research affects not only the scientists doing the work but also what research is taking place:

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