Hybrid Vigor’s co-founder Diana Rhoten has just published an op-ed in the journal Inside Higher Ed that should be of interest to anyone who is trying to understand how interdisciplinary research works in the real world.

An excerpt from the article, which you can read in its entirety here:

… As researchers interested in interdisciplinarity as an object of study, we have both been asked repeatedly about gender as predictor of participation in or success with interdisciplinary practices. We have also been confronted by scientists telling us that we should not encourage junior women to conduct interdisciplinary research because “women have a hard enough time as it is, you need to keep them focused on rigorous science or they’ll never be taken seriously.” After a growing store of anecdotal data to the point, we started to ask ourselves why we weren’t looking at gender and began listening to our peers and readers. …

Rhoten and the co-author of the article, Stephanie Pfirman, are co-chairs of a workshop at Columbia University next month on Women, Minorities, and Interdisciplinarity: Transforming the Research Enterprise.