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

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, conditional on their gender, randomly to teams. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated and female-dominated teams in terms of sales, profits and earnings per share. We explore various mechanisms and find that mutual monitoring is more intense in mixed teams than in homogeneous teams. This partially explains the better results of mixed teams.