Noah Askin (INSEAD)

Date: 

Wednesday, October 13, 2021, 4:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

WJH 1550

The Collaboration-Association Tradeoff: How The Gender Composition Of Networks And Genres Influence Artist Creativity

While creative production is widely recognized as a collective endeavor, scholarship on gender and creativity has primarily focused on individual-level gender differences in creative ability and evaluations of creative output. In this paper, we explore how the gender composition of artists’ social worlds—the collaborators with whom they interact, and the other artists with whom they are associated through shared genre membership—influences their creativity. Using an exhaustive and original dataset comprising nearly 250,000 commercially recorded songs written and released worldwide by 15,000 unique artists between 1955 and 2000, we construct a quantitative measure of musical creativity to test how the gender composition of artists’ networks and genres shape the relative novelty of their creative products. Extending prior research, we first demonstrate that female musicians are dramatically underrepresented in the field of music and produce significantly more novel music than men. We then show how artists’ creativity can be both enabled (through network diversity) and constrained (through perceived status threat) by the gender composition of their occupational environments. The results suggest a collaboration-association tradeoff, shedding new light on the role and consequences of gender composition for the creative careers of both men and women.