Do Women Undertake Interdisciplinary Research More Than Men?

In a context where funding for interdisciplinary research is gaining in importance to help solve the increasingly complex problems faced by modern societies (such as those being addressed through the UN SDGs), obtaining accurate measurements of interdisciplinarity by gender is highly relevant for funders in taking appropriate action(s) to level the playing field across genders. This is even more relevant given the conflicting evidence concerning the presence of women in interdisciplinary research, some of which could be biased by self-citations and other factors. The key result of this study is that the presence of women in scientific publications, within the large-scale dataset under investigation, is positively associated with interdisciplinarity even after controlling for a potential self-citation bias (shown to exert a slight negative effect on interdisciplinarity). This contradicts some of the prior literature on the topic but confirms results from other studies making use of different approaches—for example, using survey data. These results add to the body of literature that may suggest research performing and funding organizations should not be too concerned by women being potentially discouraged from taking part in interdisciplinary work. Nevertheless, further research would be warranted to better understand the potential impact of observed gender differences in interdisciplinarity on, for example, career progression. For instance, prior work has suggested that current evaluation practices underlying tenure decision may not be properly accounting for the specificities of interdisciplinary work. Also, further studies relying on alternative sources of information to capture interdisciplinarity (e.g., semantic analysis of full texts) could be useful to further test the robustness of this study’s results