Attractive Supervisors: How Does the Gender of the Supervisor Influence the Performance of the Supervisees?

A series of field and laboratory experiments were conducted in which single-sex groups of male or female students competed in different intellectual tasks to earn money or university grades (N = 291). The supervisor of these groups was one of several young and attractive males or females. The results show that when the supervisor was a female, the performance of male participants was, on average, negatively influenced. Group size moderated this effect such that having a female supervisor produced a negative effect in small groups and a positive effect in large groups of male supervisees.