Gender Diversity is Detrimental to Team Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment

We contribute to the inconclusive empirical research on the relationship between team gender diversity and team performance by investigating the returns to gender diversity in academia. Using a unique sample with 164 randomly formed student teams, we show that gender heterogeneity adversely affects team performance in a business strategy game. Both all-female and all-male teams outperform gender-heterogeneous teams in terms of financial success. We find evidence for the detrimental gender diversity effect to increase with task complexity. Our findings suggest that all-men and all-women teams do not differ in their strategic management behavior.