Does Gender Diversity Promote Nonconformity?

Makan Amini (), Mathias Ekström (), Tore Ellingsen, Magnus Johannesson and Fredrik Strömsten ()
Additional contact information
Makan Amini: Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford, California 94305
Mathias Ekström: NHH Norwegian School of Economics, NO-5045 Bergen, Norway; and Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden
Fredrik Strömsten: Cevian Capital, 114-32 Stockholm, Sweden

Management Science, 2017, vol. 63, issue 4, 1085-1096

Abstract: Failure to express minority views may distort the behavior of company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies. Devising a new experimental procedure to measure such conformity in a judgment task, we compare the degree of conformity in groups with varying gender composition. Overall, our experiments offer little evidence that gender composition affects expression of minority views. A robust finding is that a subject’s lack of ability predicts both a true propensity to accept others’ judgment (informational social influence) and a propensity to agree despite private doubt (normative social influence). Thus, as an antidote to conformity in our experiments, high individual ability seems more effective than group diversity.

Keywords: conformity; gender differences; group composition; skill (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2382 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Does Gender Diversity Promote Non-Conformity? (2015)
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