Gender and racial diversity socialization in science

Abstract

Scientific collaboration networks are a form of unequally distributed social capital that shapes both researcher job placement and long-term research productivity and prominence. However, the role of collaboration networks in shaping the gender and racial diversity of the scientific workforce remains unclear. Here we propose a computational null model to investigate the degree to which early-career scientific collaborators with representationally diverse cohorts of scholars are associated with forming or participating in more diverse research groups as established researchers. When testing this hypothesis using two large-scale, longitudinal datasets on scientific collaborations, we find that the gender and racial diversity in a researcher’s early-career collaboration environment is strongly associated with the diversity of their collaborators in their established period. This diversity-association effect is particularly prominent for men. Coupled with gender and racial homophily between advisors and advisees, collaborator diversity represents a generational effect that partly explains why changes in representation within the scientific workforce tend to happen very slowly.