Economics BEAT Seminar - Jose De Sousa - Gender Homophily and Feedback in Teams" University of Paris

We study how feedback affects gender homophily in teams. In a lab experiment, participants endogenously form teams for a real effort task. The salience of individual errors varies across treatments, and one treatment allows partners to send messages after errors occur. We find no gender differences in overall performance, but clear differences in homophily. While men show no homophily, women more often choose female partners, a pattern driven entirely by the highest-performing women. We investigate these results by examining gender differences in beliefs, satisfaction, and fear of negative evaluation.