Gender Composition and Team Performance : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

This research aims to explore the impact of gender composition on team project performance in a college intermediate microeconomics course, using a randomized experiment approach and applying a rich and long-term database spanning over 14 semesters at an elite public university in Taiwan. The findings demonstrate that gender composition does matter in team project performance. In addition, we find a U-shape relationship between gender ratio and team performance after controlling for prior GPA, midterm performance, individual project performance, and semester fixed effects. The results show that single-gender teams perform relatively better than gender-balanced teams, and gender diversity does not make the team perform better. Plausible explanations for our findings consist of communication and coordination failures across gender and less knowledge spillover and skill specializations for a heterogeneous team in the short term