The Impact of Gender Diversity on the Performance of Business Teams: Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper reports on a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and as...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Management science 2013-07, Vol.59 (7), p.1514-1528
Main Authors: Hoogendoorn, Sander, Oosterbeek, Hessel, van Praag, Mirjam
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Asymmetry
board effectiveness
Business studies
College students
Curriculum
Directors
Employee performance
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship education
Experiments
Females
field experiment
Field experiments
Financial management
Gender
gender diversity
Gender performativity
Gender studies
Human capital
Impact analysis
Laboratories
Learning
Management science
Return on assets
School dropouts
Start up firms
Students
Studies
team performance
Teams
Teamwork
Trucks
Women
Work groups
Workplace multiculturalism
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Summary:This paper reports on a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and assigned students randomly to teams, conditional on their gender. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated teams in terms of sales and profits. We explore various mechanisms suggested in the literature to explain this positive effect of gender diversity on performance (including complementarities, learning, monitoring, and conflicts) but find no support for them. This paper was accepted by Jesper Sørensen, organizations.
ISSN:0025-1909
1526-5501
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.1120.1674