Gender and Leadership in Teams: Experimental Evidence From In-Person and Online Team Meetings

Questions about remote work arrangements have accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While about 20 percent of employees whose jobs could be done from home did so prior to the pandemic, in 2020, about 71 percent did, and 54 percent wished to continue working from home after the pandemic ends. At the same time, many employers expect workers to return to offices, often citing workplace dynamics and patterns of collaboration that they believe may have been impeded by remote work. As part of a field experiment with 223 groups of six college students, economist Olga Stoddard and colleagues from the political science and economics departments will examine how the move from in-person to online collaboration, group gender composition, and gender of team leader affect women’s influence and authority in classroom work teams that met for several months. They randomly varied 1) whether women are in the majority or minority, and 2) the gender of the assigned study group leader. About half of the teams met face-to-face; the others, via Zoom, allowing the investigators to compare differences.