Date of Publication: July 1, 2011

Author: Hoogendoorn, Sander; Oosterbeek, Hessel; van Praag, Mirjam

Summary:

This paper reports about a eld 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 nd that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated teams in terms of sales and prots. We explore various mechanisms suggested in the literature to explain this positive eect of gender diversity on performance (including complementarities, learning, monitoring and conicts) but nd no support for them.

Link to Full Reading:

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/86933/1/11-074.pdf