Endogenously Emerging Gender Diversity in an Experimental Team Work Setting

We study gender diversity and performance in endogenously formed teams in a repeated work setting. Participants can choose whether to perform a cooperation task only with members of the own gender or in a mixed-gender team. We find that independent of the team choice, in the initial periods, men contribute significantly more to the team projects than women. This induces men to prefer the successful men-only teams in the subsequent periods, resulting in significantly higher profits for men compared to women. Only over time, this endogenously emerged “gender profit gap” closes