How The Presence Of Women Affects The Performance Of Design Teams In A Predominately Male Environment

The literature reports conflicting results regarding the effect on team performance when one or two “minorities” are added to the team. Further, there are very few studies that report on teams that are actually doing engineering or design work, and even those studies normally define “performance” as the overall grade for the project rather than indicating how the teams performed on the various aspects of the design process. The current study presents results obtained for nearly 400 students working on 99 teams with a female minority of 14.1% working on a semester-long, sophomore, design projects. The team performances are compared in four categories: artifact testing, design critiques based on initial specifications, communications, and overall project grade. The teams with one or two females slightly outperformed the all-male teams in all categories but one. However, the increased performance is not statistically significant.