Marching to Her Own Beat: Asynchronous Teamwork and Gender Differences in Performance on Creative Projects
研究异步团队协作如何影响创意项目中的性别绩效差异，通过印度民间音乐家的实地实验发现，异步工作方式能提升女性表现，缩小性别差距。
Women have traditionally been held back from performing to their full potential in creative project teams, where they typically constitute a minority. However, due to recent technological developments, the structure of teamwork is rapidly evolving. Specifically, teamwork is now often performed asynchronously: members of teams work at different times, by themselves, rather than simultaneously and together. How will this shift to asynchronous teamwork affect the performance of men and women on creative project teams? This article argues that women will perform better when teamwork is asynchronous rather than synchronous, because working alone will afford them greater freedom for creative expression. We argue that men will not experience the same boost in performance, and thus the spread of asynchronous teamwork has the potential to reduce gender disparities in performance. We explore this question in the context of folk-music ensembles in eastern India. After collecting ethnographic and interview data from folk musicians to develop our theory, we conducted a field experiment in which individual singers, men and women, recorded a song both synchronously and asynchronously with the same set of instrumentalists. This article contributes to the study of gender inequality, creativity, and the temporal restructuring of work.