Gender and Choice over Co-workers: Experimental Evidence

Abstract

We study whether choice over co-workers matters for performance in gender-diverse teams. We carried out a lab-in-the-field experiment where students were randomly assigned co-workers to help them perform on tests. Co-worker allocation was randomized on two dimensions: (1) gender and (2) student preference for that co-worker at baseline. We find that assigning a randomly-chosen male co-worker reduces the performance of female workers (12 % of the average score) relative to working alone, while a preferred male co-worker has a positive yet statistically insignificant effect on performance (6% of the average score). The effects are heterogeneous across the gender stereotype of the questions and materialize even though the two types of male co-workers have the same average ability. We find that female workers were less likely to access additional information in the presence of randomly-chosen male co-workers suggesting that social image concerns are the main mechanism behind our results.