The impact of gender diversity on the performance of business teams : evidence from a field experiment

Sander Hoogendoorn; Hessel Oosterbeek; Mirjam van Praag

This paper reports about 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.

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Year of publication:	2011
Authors:	Hoogendoorn, Sander ; Oosterbeek, Hessel ; Praag, Mirjam van
Publisher:	Rotterdam [u.a.] : Tinbergen Inst.
Subject:	Gender diversity \| team performance \| entrepreneurship \| field experiment \| entrepreneurship education \| board effectiveness \| Arbeitsgruppe \| Team \| Diversity Management \| Diversity management \| Experiment \| Unternehmer \| Entrepreneurs \| Geschlechterdiskriminierung \| Gender discrimination \| Feldforschung \| Field research \| Qualifikation \| Occupational qualification \| Entrepreneurship \| Entrepreneurship approach \| Geschlecht \| Gender \| Weibliche Führungskräfte \| Women managers \| Unternehmenserfolg \| Firm performance \| Gründungsausbildung \| Entrepreneurship education \| Niederlande \| Netherlands