Science: Why Diversity Matters

It might seem counterintuitive: In the laboratory, engineering workshop, and other academic spaces where science gets done, math-based principles rule supreme, and numbers have no language, no cultural inflection, and no gender—why should it matter who the scientists are and where they’re from? 

And yet it does: Greater geographical and ethnic diversity is correlated to stronger research and more innovation. At a juncture when diversity—particularly international diversity—is under heightened scrutiny, a critical mass of findings is pointing toward its quantitative and qualitative advantages.

Better Outcomes

“More than ever the complexity of science requires group efforts as teams of scientists from diverse backgrounds work together to make discoveries and solve problems,” according to The Scientific Basis of Individual and Team Innovation and Discovery, a report from the National Science Foundation.

Indeed, a 2014 comprehensive review of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 found that papers written by ethnically diverse teams were more often cited than papers by ethnically homogenous groups of scientists. The review, by Richard Freeman, director of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project at Harvard University, and Wei Huang, a Harvard economics PhD candidate, also noted that the strongest of these papers were created by scientists from geographically different areas working together.

It’s not as if the benefits of diversity are limited to science. A 2015 McKinsey & Company study of companies in the United Kingdom, Canada, Latin America, and the United States across a range of industries found that those in the top quartile