Borrowed plumes: the gender gap in claiming credit for teamwork

Abstract

Teamwork is prevalent in many forms of production, but individual contributions to team output are often ambiguous. We use a large-scale online experiment with an interactive team task to investigate gender differences in claiming credit for contributions to teamwork with misaligned incentives: Team members have an incentive to exaggerate their contribution, but this harms the other team member. In this setting, we observe that men claim to have contributed more than equally contributing women. Using two further between-subject treatments, we find no evidence that gender differences in altruism or in overconfidence explain the observed gender claim-gap. Further, the gender gap is present only among high contributors, and we show that the gap is particularly pronounced for large claims, which has potentially important consequences for gender equity in labour market outcomes.