The Notes on Women Scientists' Preference/Style

Holton, G. (1999). "Different Perceptions of "Good Science" and Their Effects and Careers." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 869: 78-86.

One way to escape some of the rough-and-tumble competition of life at science’s frontier is to choose a problem or subfield, a niche where with luck one can work on a problem that is important and yet not at the center of those volcanic eruptions. And that is what our women had done more often than our men. It fits with the famous remark which Marie Curie is said to have made, when she was asked why she chose to work on what was later called radioactivity – a field from which even its chance discoverer, Henri Becquerel, had withdrawn. Her response was, “I chose this field because there was no bibliography.” This approach may also have a connection to our finding that while in graduate school, women were more collaborative, but after the postdoc they became less collaborative than men, on average.

The finding is so interesting that I may relate the collaboration pattern between men and women scientists with the problems/subfields men and women choose differently.
Also, this may help explain the gender gap in publication productivity - improving the quality of publication outcomes at the cost of their quantitiative side.