STUDY: Men dislike working with women and vice versa
Do you work with fellow women or men? If so then findings on offices with plain genders will surprise you.
A new study has found out that men are more comfortable working with fellow men and women prefer to work with fellow women as well.
The study that was conducted by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and George Washington University looked at employee data and survey responses from a professional services company that has 60 offices globally.
They found that men were more comfortable and cooperative when they worked only with other men. The same was true for women who worked only with other women.
“The magnitude suggests that moving from an office evenly split between men and women to either an all-male or all-female office, holding constant other characteristics, would increase cooperation about one-sixth of a point on a five-point scale,” stated the researchers in their paper published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy.
GENDER DIVERSITY
The same study however found that all-men offices and all-women offices were not as productive as those with mixed gender.
“The estimated coefficient of 0.41 implies that going from an office that is either all male or all female to an office split equally between the sexes would be associated with a revenue gain of 41%,” read the research paper published on the MIT website.
The researchers added, “Gender diversity, in contrast, is associated with higher revenues, although this latter effect diminishes when we include office-level fixed effects. In addition, both average tenure and tenure diversity in the office are important explanatory variables.”
The study was aimed at studying how various variables affect the productivity of employees and ultimate revenue for the employer.
