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Research Highlights Featured Chart

July 23, 2025

Diversity and scientific focus

Does a more diverse undergraduate student body inspire new research on underrepresented populations?

Tyler Smith

Source: monkeybusinessimages

What scientists choose to study can have important implications for the well-being of minority groups. For instance, the lack of research on women’s unique health concerns has been linked to greater rates of misdiagnosis of medical conditions such as heart disease. But why some topics get taken up in the scientific community and others don’t is not fully understood.

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Review, authors and argue that broad environmental factors significantly influence scientists’ choice of research topics. They show that as women became a larger share of undergraduate student bodies in the United States over the course of the 20th century, research on gender-related topics increased in science—a trend driven mostly by established male researchers.

The authors drew their conclusions from the US Department of Education's data on degrees, and the —a scientific publications database containing over 200 million papers. By using keyword analysis of titles and abstracts, they were able to classify one million university-affiliated research studies according to whether they focused on gender issues or not.

Figure 2 from the authors’ paper shows how gender-related research and undergraduate gender diversity moved together between 1900 and 2015.

from Truffa and Wong (2025)

The chart plots the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women (yellow series, right axis) and the average share of papers related to gender published at each university (blue series, left axis).

At the turn of the 20th century, women earned just 20 percent of bachelor's degrees, while gender-related research was nearly nonexistent. Between 1900 and 1940, both trends steadily climbed, but dropped significantly immediately after World War II. In the 1960s, both series began a dramatic increase, and by 2015, women earned 57 percent of bachelor's degrees, while gender-related research accounted for more than 8 percent of all university publications.

The tight correlation—which the authors reinforce with more robust statistical methods—between these trends indicates that as universities became more gender-diverse, the questions scientists chose to study became more sensitive to gender-related topics. While part of the rise in gender-related publications is explained by more female researchers entering academia, the authors argue that established male researchers drove much of this increase due to their increased exposure to diversity.

The findings suggest that diversity initiatives don't just promote fairness. They can also create environments where interactions with more diverse students and peers pay scientific dividends.