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Are You More Productive At The Office When Your Team Includes Both Genders?

This article is more than 9 years old.

In one of my first jobs out of college I worked in a small San Francisco public relations firm, Horne, McClatchy & Associates, whose eight employees were all women. Now defunct, the firm raised money and staged special events for non-profit groups like UNICEF and the Exploratorium science museum. I liked my executive assistant job and I especially liked my boss, a kind, creative woman who was also a published poet.

But the longer I worked there, the more I realized I didn’t like that there were no men in the office. I feel like a bad feminist saying this, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it was about the atmosphere that grated on me. A former colleague recalls a kind of “mean girls” targeting of one of the managers, who wasn’t as efficient and well-turned-out as the other three, and there was a competitive atmosphere that I found unpleasant, which seemed tied to the fact that we were all female. Hastings law professor Joan Williams, author of What Works for Women at Work, has called the competition between women at work the “tug of war.”

So I was intrigued when I read about a study by economists at MIT and George Washington University that examines gender diversity inside workplaces and asks whether offices where women and men work together are more productive than single-gender workplaces. They also looked at how satisfied women and men were when they worked on the same team, versus how they felt on single-sex teams.

The data for the study came from a professional services firm with more than 60 offices in the US and overseas, ranging in size from a few employees to nearly 100 at headquarters. The firm gave their workers anonymous employee satisfaction surveys each year from 1995 to 2002. The study also looked at revenue data for the same time period. The data included information from teams that were all male, all female or evenly mixed.

What the researchers found: Employee morale and satisfaction were higher on single-sex teams. In the words of the paper, the data “suggest that gender diversity could have detrimental impacts on the formation of firm social capital.” But diverse teams were more productive and produced higher revenues. “People are more comfortable around people who are like them,” study co-author Sara Fisher Ellison of MIT told The Wall Street Journal. Ellison speculated that single-sex teams “socialize more and work less.” The authors say their research shows that switching from a single-sex group to a co-ed team could increase revenues by a whopping 41%.

Of course the study only looked at data from one firm, and the data could have been fresher, though the researchers say that other studies have found that gender diversity increases firm performance, and that people who are similar tend to trust one another more than heterogeneous groups.

My experience doesn’t square with the paper. We were very productive at that PR firm and I recall feeling some pride about working in a successful firm operated entirely by women. But I haven’t forgotten the unique atmosphere of tension, and how relieved I felt when a couple of men came in and temped. In my journalism career, I have always been perfectly happy working on teams that included both men and women.

The paper, published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, is by Ellison of MIT and Wallace P. Mullin of George Washington University.

Please comment if you have thoughts on the study.