Gendered effects on scientific novelty : The link between gender, knowledge, team and the novelty of science in academia.

The novelty of the research is crucial in order to make the society move forward. We argue that the closure of the gender gap still prevailing in academia, by bringing more women into scientific research, can improve novelty. Indeed, women have different skills and personality traits likely to positively shape the knowledge transfers inside the research teams and thus to trigger novelty. Our hypothesis is that women have higher peer effects on their co-author than men. Using articles indexed in MEDLINE, we calculate various measures of novelty and test our hypothesis through a difference-in-difference strategy. We extract the impact of a woman on her peers by measuring the change in her coauthors’ novelty before and after she disappears from the team. Our results confirm the hypothesis for some of the novelty measures: female presence in research teams does well enhance co-authors’ novelty and thus novelty of the research.