Gender diversity and publication activity – an analysis of STEM in the UK

Gender diversity in STEM remains a significant issue, as the field continues to be a male dominated one, despite increased attention on the subject. This article examines the interplay between gender diversity on projects funded by a major UK research council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the publication activity of a project, as measured by the average journal quality of project publication output, over a 10-year period. The proportion of female representation and leadership on these projects remains very low. For the projects examined as part of this study, over 70% of these projects have no female representation, and less than 15% have a female lead. This study does not find a significant relationship between gender diversity and journal quality output. This study highlights that an important avenue for future work is the development of alternative metrics to assess the performance of research projects in a discipline characterized by very low levels of gender diversity, to fully unpack the impact of project team gender diversity on project output activity.