Gender Salience and Chat-Based Communication in Teams

I use a lab experiment to study the effect of gender priming on chat-based communication in mixed- and same-gender teams with a real-effort task. I find that priming gender seems to evoke stereotypes about men's and women's roles in communication, causing men to make significantly more chat entries and women to write significantly fewer words and fewer chat entries. While same-gender teams communicate more with each other in the absence of gender priming, mixed-gender teams perform better on the assigned task, pointing to the value of gender diversity in the workplace.