Nielsen: There is a “chicken-and-egg problem.” Which came first, the openness of disciplines to new questions or the increasing participation of underrepresented groups in those disciplines? Presumably, the relationship is reciprocal, but the direction of causality is difficult to establish, even in large-scale, multi-year studies like ours.

Our study demonstrates a clear link between researcher demographics and the questions raised in historical research. Our findings suggest that increased diversity can broaden the repertoire of perspectives, values, and questions at play in academic fields. I hope to see much more research on this important question in the future.

Schiebinger: Our work has three limitations and ethical concerns. First, current name algorithmic tools do not provide categories beyond the binary “woman” or “man.” Second, we found no satisfactory tools to classify authors’ ethnicity. This resulted in our third limitation—we could not analyze how gender, ethnicity, and other social categories might interact. We could not see, for example, the distinctive contributions of Black women, of which there are many, including the development of the concept of intersectionality itself.

The categories of race and gender are currently undergoing massive conceptual change and this work has the potential to support social change and interventions. For example, the National Institutes of Health recently tasked the National Academies of Sciences to develop new gender categories for patient records, birth certificates, and the like. This, in turn, will create new datasets for the type of social analyses we demonstrated in our analysis of history. Our ultimate goal is to work across the social sciences, humanities, and artificial intelligence to develop robust tools for intersectional approaches to gender, race, and ethnicity in knowledge production.