The presence of women in teams is known to make them more innovative and better at making effective decisions, but a recent study from Vanderbilt University also highlights how the presence of women in political teams can affect our perceptions of those teams.

The researchers analyzed a number of fictional bipartisan legislative committees, both in terms of their gender makeup and also the decisions they made, especially on issues affecting women’s rights.  The committees were constructed so as to have a mixture of all male and gender-balanced groups, with the decision under review being to increase or decrease penalties for workplace sexual harassment, which overwhelmingly affect women.

The committees were assessed depending on their view of the issue as something that benefits society as a whole, or women specifically, together with how fair they viewed it for women.  They were also interested in how the public perceived the decisions.

Fair representation

Interestingly, the presence of women in the committee had a big impact on the perceived legitimacy of any decisions made against women, especially among men, for whom this effect was roughly doubled.

“This effect may be particularly strong for men because they have less certain opinions about the issue of sexual harassment, and thus may be more easily persuaded by women’s presence,” the authors say. “Women, on the other hand, are more likely to have strong pre-existing feelings about the issue.”

The issue was probed further by asking volunteers to rate how big an issue they thought sexual harassment was.  Around 75% of women thought it was a big issue, versus just 55% of men, which seems to confirm the hypothesis of the authors that women had firmer opinions on the matter than men, who were thus more easily swayed by a gender-balanced committee.

In further analysis, the researchers probed respondents on their feelings about the legitimacy of the deliberative process rather than the outcome.  Each volunteer rated the fairness of the process, and then answered a number of questions on their faith in the committee making fair decisions.

It transpired that gender-balanced teams were perceived as not only more legitimate, but also more likely to make fair decisions.  This was especially pronounced when the decisions being made were anti-feminist in nature however.

In an attempt to remove gender from the equation, they then replicated the experiment, but replacing sexual harassment with animal cruelty as the issue at hand.  In this more gender neutral issue, a balanced committee increased trust in the process, but there was no difference between the views of men and women.

The findings were consistent not only immediately after the 2016 presidential election, where gender was a particularly hot topic, but also a year later before the #MeeToo movement had gathered steam.

“In future research, we’re interested in exploring how messages of women’s inclusion or exclusion in political decision-making compel citizens, both men and women, to become more involved in the political process, including the decision to run for office,” the team conclude.