Group diversity

Diversity is a creative force that broadens views and enhances ideas; it increases productivity as well as the impact of our science, making our respective organisations more agile and timely. Equality of opportunity is a key to success for any research organisation. Here we argue that every research organisation, whether in academia or in industry, needs to have better inclusion policies to harness the benefits of diversity in research. Drawing from our personal experiences and perspectives as women in science, we share our suggestions on how to promote inclusion in academia and create a better research culture for all. Our shared experiences highlight the many hurdles women in science face on a daily basis. We stress that rules and regulations, as well as education for awareness, will play critical role in this much needed shift from a male-dominated scientific culture that dates from Victorian times to a modern focus on gender equality in science. The key ingredients of this new culture will be flexibility, transparency, fairness and thoughtfulness.

Little is known about the dynamics of human cooperation in groups with changing compositions. Using data from a large-scale and long-term online public goods game, this study shows how group changes are associated with temporarily lower cooperation.

Boda et al. find that refugee adolescents in Germany have fewer friends and are more often rejected in school. However, ethnic diversity supports social integration, with majority group peers building more positive ties to refugees in more diverse settings.

This rapid realist review of universal interventions to promote inclusivity and acceptance of diverse sexual and gender identities in schools finds that interventions appear to work best when school staff are trained and the school climate is supportive. Interventions may be less effective for boys, gender minority students and bisexual students.

Using publication and editorial team composition records from more than 1,000 journals, Liu and coauthors uncover pervasive gender inequalities among academic editors. Only 8% of editors-in-chief are women. Nearly 6% of editors publish one-third of all their papers in the journal they edit, and this self-publication pattern is stronger among men editors.