🏁 Gender-diverse peer groups can be powerful and beneficial.

Educators and institutions should consider forming mixed-gender rather than homogeneous groups, e.g., project teams, lab groups, shared offices, production teams, etc.

Read full paper here: dropbox.com/scl/fi/a2h15...

4⃣ Gender diversity significantly improves students' subjective well-being:
– Satisfaction with the assigned group ↑
– Self-confidence about future achievement ↑
– Mental health ↑

3⃣ Gender diversity increases men's general competitiveness, which associates with significantly higher performance.
– Groups are collaborative: men are not competing against group members
– Exposure to the opposite gender still makes them more competitive

2⃣ Gender diversity leads to more collaborative & inclusive social dynamics:
– Boosts group/pairwise activities, both within- & cross-gender (see fig)
– Especially interactions with lowest-performing member
→ Knowledge sharing, peer mentoring, or role model effects

So why does gender diversity improve performance?

1⃣ The effect is not driven by & distinct from other diversities:
– Robust to controlling for a large set of group characteristics
– Diversities of nationality, cognitive/non-cognitive ability have different effects (see fig)

Spillovers:

Impact of gender diversity extends beyond the course where study groups are assigned.
It also …
▶️ improves grades in other first-semester courses
▶️ improves grades in next-semester courses, especially compulsory ones
▶️ lowers dropout rates one year later

Which member benefits most?

Group-level analyses show that gender diversity
▶️ significantly raises group minimum grade
▶️ has no impact on maximum grade
▶️ substantially reduces grade variance

Implication:
→ No one gets hurt
→ Academically struggling member benefits most

Main finding:

Students assigned to a more gender-diverse group perform significantly better.

▶️ Moving from a homogeneous to a gender-balanced group raises grades by 0.15 SD (p-val=.003)
▶️ Similar effect for ♂️ & ♀️
▶️ Robust across baseline ability, personality, SES and 7 cohorts

Set-up:

3,060 students in a first-semester course at a European university are randomly assigned to 765 study groups
→ Exogenous & large variation in gender composition

Groups are designed for long-term collaboration in common courses
→ Strong connections & lasting effects