Vini Singh, PhD│CHIBE Research Seminar
December 05, 2024
| 12:00 pm ‐ 1:00 pm | Virtual
Speaker(s)
- Vini Singh, PhD — Assistant Professor of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University
Event Description
Topic: “Gender Mix and Team Performance: Evidence from Obstetrics.”
Registration is required to attend this virtual seminar. To register, please visit:
https://upenn.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMkf-urpz0tHNSCy7BEVm5S4xSCeUmF7XUj.
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About: We examine how the gender mix of expert teams affects performance in a high-stakes setting: childbirth. Using quasi-random patient assignments to teams of varying gender mix, we find that same-gender teams improve female, but not male, physician performance. If female-only teams had handled all deliveries in our sample, 9.5% of maternal complications and 12.3% of fetal deaths would have been prevented. This result is not due to differences in patient characteristics or physician skill across teams. Instead, team performance is driven by members’ preferences for discretionary or discriminatory obstetric practices —which vary significantly by gender—and the team’s ability to resolve conflicts in these preferences. For instance, mixed-gender teams led by female physicians are particularly harmed by frictions to teamwork (such as a lack of prior collaboration), likely because the reversal of gender norms in leadership roles impedes the resolution of preference conflicts. These findings suggest that team gender mix can substantially affect performance in critical tasks.
Vini Singh, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. received her PhD in Health Economics and Policy from Emory University. Her interests lie at the intersection of decision theory and health policy. Dr. Singh is particularly interested in how physicians make decisions, the effects of organizational and policy environments on such decisions, and its implications for patient welfare.