Fight against climate change: Research & Innovation would benefit from involving more women

Women are highly underrepresented in the technological innovation process, constituting less than 30% of engineering cohorts and hard science researchers. This deficit must be rectified, and it could mean good news for the fight against climate change, as the involvement of women may speed up the search for innovative solutions. There is therefore some room for manoeuvre.

That is the conclusion drawn from our research on the challenges of innovation to counter climate change, recently published in Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Our analysis is based on a systematic literature review of 1,275 articles published since 1975 in journals from the Harzing List (collation of various management science journal rankings around the world).

Female researchers are highly productive

First of all, it has been amply proven that women who choose this career path demonstrate a high degree of productivity: female researchers focus on research questions they engage with on a personal level more frequently than their male counterparts. Though it is difficult to formulate a rule that applies to all women, the literature shows that female researchers choose to study questions that truly motivate them, avoiding research subjects born out of career opportunism or secondary curiosity.

This focus means that they are more productive, submitting more patents and publishing more results. One of the main explanations for this can be found in the social constraints experienced by women during their PhD studies, which push them to surpass themselves: for many years, female researchers suffered discrimination when seeking scholarships and applying for their first position.

What’s more, in a context where we must urgently find alternative technological solutions to those currently in use in order to address climate change, the sociological position of female researchers pushes them to be more efficient.

This efficiency is even more notable when it comes to transforming a patented invention into an innovation. The literature also shows that women are eager to adopt new technologies when they are seen to have a social impact. Female researchers have less ambition than their male counterparts to see their invention transformed into an innovation, except if this innovation can help others and serve a societal purpose.

Women adopt more useful innovations

On the other hand, we see an ability to innovate when women’s work is respected. And conversely, they are less creative and productive when in a toxic work environment.

Given the social drive shown by women, our hypothesis is that a greater presence of female researchers, motivated by the search for new energy-efficient technologies or alternatives for existing technologies, will only mean enhanced levels of productivity in their work.

It appears therefore that women could well be useful in the early stages of the innovation process to fight climate change. Their contribution may also be valuable later in the process, when an innovation has been launched on the market and is about to be adopted.

We know that the adoption of innovations is related more to social class than gender. And yet, since the 1990s, it has been shown that women are less likely to adopt innovations that they consider as not useful – what we could call “gadget” innovations.

While this observation has been made for the case of the adoption of IT innovations, our hypothesis is that a greater presence of women, when assessing innovations, would make it possible to distinguish between those that truly contribute to the fight against climate change and those that are ineffective, though they may seem attractive on the surface.

Persistent discrimination

These qualities attributed to women are not an intrinsic part of their gender, but are the result of positions and reactions to discrimination. And yet, though these qualities are positive, recent literature has shown persistent signs of discrimination against women, particularly in innovation processes: when hiring for research positions, promotions to positions of leadership in research laboratories, etc.

Researchers who become mothers are also reluctant to travel to conferences far from their home, which means they are excluded from the networks essential to generating new opportunities for collaboration, publication and above all new research posts.

Women working in companies in the area of innovation and creation processes also experience the same obstacles faced by female researchers: their ideas for innovations are rarely adopted in the ideation process, and promotions to leadership positions, where they would have the power to select useful technologies and avoid gadget innovations to fight climate change more effectively, often appear blocked by the “glass ceiling”.

We believe that fighting gender discrimination in the business world could be an important way to accelerate the efficiency of technological innovation processes to counter climate change.