By now, managers likely understand the importance of having gender-diverse teams, particularly for collaborative tasks. But some may consider it more of an ethical or reputational issue than an actual factor in the quality of work the team is producing.

Yet new research shows that, at least when it comes to teams of scientists, gender balance makes a huge difference to the work itself.

“The more gender-balanced the team is, the better the team does,” says Professor Brian Uzzi, one of the researchers on the new study. “Men and women are both part of the recipe for success in science. We’re better together.”

We’ll explore the research in more detail today. We’ll also discuss another study related to gender that looks at a reason why men may act out at work.

Gender-Balanced Teams Do Better Work

Science is very much a team sport, with large teams growing increasingly common over the past 50 years.

So the optimal composition of those teams has become increasingly important if we want to achieve more scientific breakthroughs.

In their research, Uzzi, a professor of management and organizations, along with Benjamin Jones, a strategy professor, and coauthors focused specifically on the gender composition of scientific teams.

The researchers analyzed 6.6 million biomedical science papers published from 2000 to 2019, using an algorithm to infer authors’ genders from their names. (This method, while imperfect and unable to capture complexity in gender expression or identity, was extremely efficient, and produced figures consistent with official data about the gender makeup of medical-school faculty.)

The researchers then used the citations a paper both received and contained to calculate the impact and novelty of each paper at the time of its publication. Their analysis showed that mixed-gender teams significantly outperformed same-gender teams on both impact and novelty.

A mixed-gender team of six or more researchers was 9.1 percent more likely to produce a novel paper and 14.6 more likely to produce a highly impactful paper than a same-gender team of the same size. What’s more, the novelty and impact benefits were strongest when teams were gender-balanced—that is, a team of three men and three women was more likely to produce novel and highly cited research than one with four men and two women.

While the research didn’t directly address the question of why mixed-gender teams outperform same-gender teams, Uzzi has a general hypothesis. “We think that gender affects the process by which scientists generate ideas and then select the best ideas to follow,” he says. In other words, perhaps the exchange of ideas is more lively, creative, and constructive in a gender-diverse group.

You can read more about the research here.

How Certain Types of Taunts Can Lead to Bad Behavior at Work

Now let’s look at another aspect of gender in the workplace: how certain kinds of language can lead to bad behavior.

There are a host of things that can cause problematic behavior for employees of all genders. New research from Maryam Kouchaki, a professor of management and organizations, focused on the impact of emasculating taunts, such as “man up” or “take it like a man.”

She and coauthors found that being on the receiving end of emasculating taunts from coworkers or superiors can increase men’s misbehavior in the workplace, such as arriving late, working slowly, being rude to colleagues, or submitting false receipts for reimbursement.

Interestingly, gender threats—which, in this case, refer not to issues such as sexual harassment but rather to having one’s status as a man or woman questioned—don’t affect women in the same way. When women are told they aren’t behaving in stereotypically feminine ways, their bad behavior does not increase, the researchers found.

This difference is likely related to the way many cultures envision masculinity as compared with femininity. “There’s this idea that manhood is fragile,” Kouchaki says. “You have to earn it or build it—it’s work to be done.”

When their masculinity is threatened, a body of literature shows, men try to reassert it through aggressive behavior. In a bar, this might manifest as throwing a punch; at work, in nasty comments or petty theft.

You can read more about the research here.

LEADERSHIP TIP

“Your people, instead of working, are spending most of their time trying to figure out, who owns the company? And what’s going to happen to my job? What’s going to happen to my family? How do you plan for what your new products or development is going to be over the next year when you don’t know what’s going to happen next week? Planning kind of comes to a halt.”

—Clinical professor Harry Kraemer in Insider, on the “devastating” impact of the Twitter saga on company employees.