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Does gender structure influence R&D efficiency? A regional perspective

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Abstract

The gender structure in research and development (R&D) activities has received more and more attention in terms of its increasing importance in R&D management, but it is still not clear what the R&D efficiency discrepancy between female and male personnel is in the science and technology (S&T) field and whether the gender structure affects the R&D efficiency. Based on the region-level panel dataset of China’s research institutes, this study uses four types of R&D outputs (papers, books, patents and standards) together and individually to measure R&D efficiency score to reveal this topic. When four types of R&D outputs are jointly considered, this paper applies the multi-output stochastic frontier analysis and finds that in general the higher proportion of male R&D personnel produces the higher R&D efficiency. Nevertheless, in terms of S&T papers or S&T books as a single R&D output, we find that the higher proportion of female R&D personnel leads to the higher R&D efficiency. On the contrary, the R&D efficiency is lower with the higher proportion of female R&D personnel when the single R&D output is measured by invention patent applications or national/industrial standards, respectively. Our findings suggest that the female R&D personnel are more effective in conducting scientific research activities, while their counterparts are more effective in doing technology development activities.

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Acknowledgements

The work in this paper was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 71804008, 71804028, 71874179), the Youth Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research, Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 18YJC630251), and the China Youth Innovation Promotion Association (Grant No. 2015131) (Project No. Y201121Z01).

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Author notes

  1. Mingting Kou, Yi Zhang, Yu Zhang, Kaihua Chen, Jiancheng Guan have contributed equally to this paper and they are considered as the co-first authors. The work in this study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number, 71804008; 71804028; 71471170), the Project of Humanistic and Social Sciences Research, Ministry of Education of China (Grant number, 18JHQ078; 18YJC630251), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant number, FRF-TP-19-008A2) and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province in China (Grant number, 2018A030310682).

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Donglinks School of Economics and Management, University of Sciences and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China

    Mingting Kou

  2. School of Management, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, China

    Yi Zhang

  3. Institutes of Innovation and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yu Zhang & Kaihua Chen

  4. School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jiancheng Guan

  5. School of Strategy and Leadership, Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB, UK

    Senmao Xia

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  1. Mingting Kou
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Correspondence to Yu Zhang.

Appendices

Appendix 1: The number of research institutes from each region in China

Based on China Statistical Yearbook on Science and Technology, we manually collected the number of research institutes in each province of China from 2009 to 2017, which are presented in Table 9 as follows.

Table 9 The number of research institutes from each region in China from 2009 to 2017
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Appendix 2: Robustness checks with instrumental variables

See Table 10.

Table 10 Maximum likelihood estimation with instrumental variables
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Kou, M., Zhang, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. Does gender structure influence R&D efficiency? A regional perspective. Scientometrics 122, 477–501 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03282-x

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