Champions of Equality: Examining Gender Egalitarianism in Virtual Teams across Cultures

This study highlights the importance of considering gender and offline cultural context when working in virtual teams. To this end, we examine gender differences in performance and participation within virtual teams in a popular online game, drawing from behavioral game data from game servers in nine countries, each representing a distinct region of the world. Results are compared to metrics from the GLOBE study, allowing us to examine how offline cultural context relates to the data derived from these virtual teams. While this study is largely exploratory, it suggests the important point that offline gender dynamics in a given culture are not necessarily replicated by the virtual team participants from those cultures and thus that virtual team managers should be mindful of such dynamics. Further implications are discussed.