Three instincts mingled in the delight which greeted the award of the Breakthrough science prize to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell this week. The first was a kind of renewed awe at her landmark achievement: the dramatic discovery of pulsars in the 1970s. The second was a sense of justice served, given that she was notoriously overlooked for a Nobel. The third was admiration at her generosity. Already known for encouraging and promoting women in academia, she is donating her $3m (£2.3m) prize to fund PhD studentships for female, black and minority ethnic and refugee researchers. Her gift recognises the obstacles they face – but also the contribution they can make: her own discovery happened in part because of her minority status, she suggests.

The benefits of being an outsider are far from obvious in her case. At Glasgow, she was the only woman studying physics; the men catcalled and banged on their desks each time she walked into the room. She came from Northern Ireland, and at Cambridge was surrounded by English southerners. Her extraordinary breakthrough was at first dismissed by her supervisor. Yet later, he won the Nobel for the discovery; she did not. When media did cover her work, she was quizzed about boyfriends and asked to undo buttons for photographs.

How easily she might have been deterred – and how much science would have lost. Embracing diversity is not just about fairness; it is the only way to ensure that professions gain from the most talented and committed in the field. One analysis by researchers at the US National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that as much as a quarter of GDP growth per capita in the US between 1960 and 2010 can be accounted for by the falling barriers to women and minority ethnic employees: the country made better use of talent it had previously squandered.

But Dame Jocelyn suggested a less obvious benefit this week: that “minority folk bring a fresh angle on things … a lot of breakthroughs come from left field”.

Sometimes a more diverse body of thinkers simply notices what an artificially narrow group never spotted. A city planner from a deprived background or with disabilities may be more conscious of how facilities can be accessed and used. Londa Schiebinger of Stanford University, an expert on the history of science, has shown how unintentionally biased research has cost not only money but lives – for example, in using men as the paradigm when testing car safety or developing new drugs.

But there is also mounting evidence that diverse decision makers produce better outcomes across fields, even in brute terms such as financial returns. This is in part because they are less likely to be captured by groupthink. “Outsiders” have a different perspective and, in sharing it, may remind others to question their assumptions. Dame Jocelyn’s generous gift is good news for all underrepresented groups in the field. But it is better news for science as a whole.