Strength in Numbers: A Field Experiment in Gender, Influence, and Group Dynamics
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Our next event will be a talk by Dr. Olga Stoddard, an assistant professor of economics at Brigham Young University. She will be discussing a field experiment she conducted on women's influence in groups.
Policy interventions to increase women's presence in the workforce and leadership positions vary in their intensity, with some requiring a lone woman and others setting higher quotas. However, little is known about how the resulting group gender compositions influence individuals' experiences and broader workplace dynamics. In this paper, we investigate whether lone women are disadvantaged compared to women on majority-women mixed-gender teams. We conducted a multi-year field experiment with a top-10 undergraduate accounting program that randomized the gender composition of semester-long teams. Using laboratory, survey, and administrative data, we find that even after accounting for their proportion of the group, lone women are seen as less influential by their peers, are less likely to be chosen to represent the group and to influence group decisions than women on majority-women teams. Lone women also participate slightly less in group discussions and receive less credit when they do. Women's increased authority in majority-women teams is driven primarily by men's behavior, not homophily or self-assessment. We find that over time, the gap in general assessments of influence between lone and other women shrinks, but this improvement does not carry over to task-specific assessments. Our findings have implications for team assignments in male-dominated settings and cast significant doubt on the idea that women can solve influence gaps by “leaning in.”
Dr. Stoddard is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University and Research Fellow at IZA - Institute of Labor Economics. She is also a Research Director at Science of Diversity and Inclusion Initiative and co-organizes a bi-weekly online Seminar on the Economics of Discrimination and Disparities. Dr. Stoddard’s research uses insights from behavioral economics to study gender and racial differences in labor markets and to evaluate the impact of various interventions aimed at increasing diversity in the workplace.
You can learn more about her research on her website: sites.google.com/view/olgastoddard