Highlights

• Even though companies can see the benefit of having women in leadership, there are less studies supporting that claim.
• Two recent studies were done to bridge that gap and they looked at women's impact in team compositions and leadership.
• Findings found having a female leader leads to groups - regardless of gender make up - to shrink the gender segregation gap that can stem from having too many male leaders.

In 2018, Marianne Bertrand presented her Coase Lecture with a simple message: Women matter. Throughout the lecture, she discusses various actions that companies could take, like gender quotas in leadership positions and in teams, along with other policy responses.

The intended goal for this lecture was to address the growing issue of women being underrepresented in male-dominated positions - notably in leadership.

The good news is that since that lecture, companies have been taking those actions and seeing for themselves whether there are benefits from doing so. In terms of solid empirical evidence, that is still thin.

Even the evidence for having a mixed gendered Board via gender quotes is little currently.

But what can be confirmed is there are two papers stressing the importance of women in teams. Specifically what kind of impact women have on specific team compositions and also their impact in leadership positions.

Women Take The Back-burner When Outnumbered

Looking into the impact of women have on teams, the first paper divided volunteers into various groups and into two separate experiments.

The first experiment consisted of groups primarily male dominated while the second had increasingly female dominated groups. This is in addition to the second experiment having a mixture of male or female leadership roles.

Each group was to mimic a work environment and finished off with a team building activity that measured individual performance and teamwork.

What was interesting in both experiments, women had lower perceived and actual influence and authority in the groups that were dominated by men compared to groups dominated by women. It's interesting because this view was held by both male and female peers.

Even though women and men equally speak up and contribute to the activities, the experiment was able to prove women struggle more to gain influence and authority in majority male groups.

But What If The Leader Was Female?

But the catch to all this is these presumptions are thrown out the window when the leader assigned to the group is a woman. According to the second experiment, where groups were randomly assigned a male or female leader, the ones with female leaders had equal chance of being nominated as a spokesperson for the group.

Regardless of gender. Regardless of group composition.

While each group composition for both experiments varied in terms of gender. This first study was able to show the impact of women and how they shape group discussions.

The findings though beg a follow-up question though:

What is it about female leadership that makes the outcome different?

How Do Women Impact Teams As Leaders?

This is where the second study comes in. Conducted this year, the study looked at 24 large corporations in Turkey and took a total sample size of 2,000 professionals - both leaders and subordinates.

From there they looked at the data and asked a simple question: does female and male leadership impact workers differently?

The answer is an unsurprising yes.

Primarily because leaders create different workplace cultures.

While each workplace culture is different based on leadership style, there is a broader difference in terms of demographics like gender. For example, while male workers will report receiving the same amount of support regardless of who is in charge. Meanwhile female workers will receive significantly more support in professional and personal matters if the leader is a women.

But what's also striking is that even though male workers get the same level of support, they are more likely to form links and bond with female workers when there is a woman leading the team. In other words, there is less segregation when women are in charge.

This in turn can suggest that having a woman in a leadership role can directly or indirectly influence the views of gender segregated networks in businesses.

Despite many articles talking about the benefits of women in leadership positions being a good thing, we have two more studies now confirming one simple thing: having women in leadership is a good thing and addresses some deep rooted business views that are more of a hinderance now more than ever.

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