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

Sander Hoogendoorn, Hessel Oosterbeek and Mirjam Praag
Additional contact information
Sander Hoogendoorn: University of Amsterdam

No 11-074/3, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: This discussion paper resulted in an article in Management Science . Volume 59 issue 7, pages 1514-1528.

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.

Keywords: Gender diversity; team performance; entrepreneurship; field experiment; entrepreneurship education; board effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J16 L25 L26 M13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-04-11, Revised 2014-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/11074.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Gender Diversity on the Performance of Business Teams: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tin:wpaper:20110074

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().