Leader Gender, Participation, and the Quality of Contributions in Groups

Brit Grosskopf and Yangfei Lin
Additional contact information
Brit Grosskopf: Department of Economics, University of Exeter
Yangfei Lin: School of Economics, Zhejiang University

No 2601, Discussion Papers from University of Exeter, Department of Economics

Abstract: In a controlled laboratory experiment, we study how leader gender affects both the willingness of group members to contribute ideas and the informational quality of those contributions. Participants are randomly assigned to groups of three, consisting of one merit-based leader and two group members. Group members submit answers to a general knowledge task and report their willingness - on a scale from one to five - to have their answer selected as the group response. In the baseline condition, gender information is not revealed; in the treatment condition, the gender of the leader and group members is disclosed. We find that men become significantly more willing to contribute when led by a female leader, while women’s willingness does not depend on leader gender. However, this increase in male participation is accompanied by a decline in the accuracy threshold at which men are willing to step forward. In contrast, women raise their accuracy threshold under female leadership, contributing only when they are highly confident in the correctness of their answers. As a result, conditional on stating the highest willingness level, men are substantially less accurate under female leadership, whereas women are more accurate. We refer to this asymmetric pattern as a sisterhood effect. We find no corresponding brotherhood effect: men do not exhibit higher conditional accuracy under male leadership relative to the no-gender benchmark. On the selection side, leaders strongly weight stated willingness when choosing whose answer represents the group. When gender is revealed, female leaders are more likely to select female group members, whereas male leaders show no systematic gender-based selection. This selection behaviour mitigates the lower quality of highly willing male contributions under female leadership and preserves group performance. Overall, leader gender shapes collective decision-making not by altering underlying ability, but by changing how private knowledge is translated into expressed willingness and how that willingness is filtered into group choices.

Keywords: leader gender; information aggregation; participation decisions; confidence thresholds; group performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D83 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://exetereconomics.github.io/RePEc/dpapers/DP2601.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:exe:wpaper:2601

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Exeter, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sebastian Kripfganz ().