Men's and Women's Health as a Function of Gender Composition in Work Teams

Abstract

This research contributes to the ongoing debate about the relationship between gender and health by shedding light on the role of team gender diversity. In Study 1 the relationship between gender diversity in teams and individual-level health symptoms of men and women was examined in two consecutive years in 220 work teams from a German public administration (Year 1, N = 4538; Year 2, N = 5182). As expected, we found that individual- level gender was not related to health symptoms but that team gender composition determined this relationship. Specifically, controlling for several confounding variables (e.g., group size, task complexity, job level), we found that women reported more health symptoms as the proportion of female employees in the team increased, while men’s self-reported health symptoms remained invariant. This effect was stable over two years. In a second study, including 304 employees working in 61 teams in an Israeli financial services organization, we found that team gender diversity had a...