Gender Differences in Team Work and Team Competition

Does gender play a role in the context of team work? For two different team-based incentive schemes, revenue sharing within a team and competition between teams, we varied the gender composition of the teams. Our results are based on a real-effort experiment and suggest that gender differences in performance depend on the composition of the teams. We found that female and male performance dif-fer significantly in mixed teams with revenue sharing between the team members as well as in team competition when male teams compete against male teams and female teams compete against female teams. We found no significant effects caused by the composition of the teams when studying differences in performance for a given gender. The results suggest that there can be a tension between the objec-tive to maximize overall performance and the potential goal of minimizing gender inequality