In the venture capital world, it’s well known that female founders receive less backing than their male peers, but this is not confined to the entrepreneurial world, with research from Ohio State University revealing that female scientists are also likely to have their ideas devalued.

The researchers tracked the flow of ideas to adoption and found that even some of the most celebrated breakthroughs in biomedical research had a tougher time gaining approval when the research teams were dominated by women.

Indeed, the five-year adoption rate for female-majority teams was a shocking 23% lower than it was for male-majority teams.  The researchers suggest one possible reason for this might be the poorer professional networks of female scientists, but even when connections do exist, women often struggle to get their ideas heard.

“Men are less likely to adopt women’s ideas even if they are only a step or two away from the female innovators in the network,” the researchers explain.

Unfair hurdles

The authors believe that Black and Hispanic scientists may face similar hurdles, as they discovered similar patterns to those encountered by female scientists.  The findings emerged after an analysis of biomedical studies published between 1980 and 2008 in the MEDLINE database.

The researchers focused their attention on influential new ideas and used natural language processing to discover words and phrases that represent new ideas in the database. They then calculated how frequently these phrases were repeated by other scientists in the 10 years after they were first used.

The results show that new ideas were most likely to be adopted by fellow scientists close to the originator in their professional network.  Unfortunately, many female scientists had smaller networks than their male peers, which partly explains the difference in adoption between female-led teams and male-led teams.  The bulk of the difference, however, was that male scientists were less likely to adopt new ideas from female researchers.

Typically, researchers appeared most likely to adopt ideas from fellow researchers of the same gender, which given the disparity in the number of female to male researchers in part explains the lower adoption of ideas put forward by women.  It’s a situation that has obvious real-world consequences.

“Other research suggests that female researchers are more likely to study health conditions in women,” the researchers conclude. “If the ideas of female innovators get less attention, that could have important implications for health disparities between men and women.”