The Nexus between Gender Diversity and Research Performance: The Case of Public Procurement

ABSTRACT

Although the nexus between performance and gender diversity has been widely researched in different contexts, we know little about the role gender diversity in co-authoring procurement research plays on research productivity. Using diversity performance literature as a theoretical backdrop and drawing on data from articles published in three procurement journals, the study runs negative binomial regressions. This study has implications for academic institutions and research team’s performance with the results demonstrating that gender diversity has trivial impact on research performance and that the publication outlet is a significant predictor of research performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender diversity
• team performance
• research performance
• public procurement

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Mathias Wullum Nielsen, associate professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark for the invaluable feedback on the manuscript and Anne Geyer’s assistance with proofreading and editing the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The authors also operationalized the independent variables by number of females on the team, percentage of females on the team, and binary variable if the team includes a female.

2. In social science first authors are presumably the leading authors (Larivière et al., 2016; Nielsen & Borjeson, 2019).

3. We also run number of females on the team, percentage of females on the team, binary variable if the team includes a female, binary variable of two or more females on the team as different measures of the independent variables and the results were consistent. The results are available upon request.