Women and men pursue different but complementary forms of scientific innovation. Analyzing 261,452 solo-authored papers by U.S. scholars, with patterns confirmed by millions of multi-authored articles, we show that women more often bridge distant disciplines through novel reference combinations, while men more often recombine concepts within fields. Women's interdisciplinary innovations prove more disruptive and more prescient, yet science penalizes them for it. For equally innovative work, women's papers land in lower-prestige journals and tend to receive less downstream citation credit, though their disruptive impact is greater. These gaps narrow only at extreme levels of novelty, suggesting women must produce exceptionally surprising work to achieve parity. Men's within-field concept innovations, by contrast, attract recognition from disciplinary gatekeepers who control careers. The asymmetry reveals not a deficit in women's contributions but a reward structure that systematically undervalues the boundary-crossing work most likely to transform fields.

翻译：男女科学家追求不同但互补的科学创新形式。通过分析261,452篇美国学者独著论文（其模式经数百万篇合著文章验证），我们发现女性更常通过新颖参考文献组合连接远缘学科，而男性则更倾向于在领域内重新整合概念。女性的跨学科创新更具颠覆性和前瞻性，但科学界却因此对其施以惩罚。对于同等创新水平的成果，女性论文发表于影响力较低的期刊，且在下游引用方面获得的认可较少——尽管其颠覆性影响更大。这种差距仅在极端新颖性水平上缩小，表明女性必须产出异常突破性研究成果才能获得平等认可。相比之下，男性在学科内的概念创新更能吸引控制职业发展的学科守门人的认可。这种不对称现象揭示的不是女性贡献的不足，而是奖励体系系统性地贬低了最有可能改变学科格局的跨边界工作。