The Hidden Advantage of All-Women Training Groups

Although that number has since settled to about 22 percent, remote work is no longer a fringe arrangement but a mainstream reality for upwards of 30 million people. As remote work became a regular feature of the labor landscape, so too did remote training, in the form of job-skilling platforms like Coursera, boot camps like edX, and startup accelerators such as Y Combinator. These online platforms have opened new pathways for individuals to build skills and credentials. For many women, including mothers, this flexibility has made remote training an especially appealing route to career mobility. Researchers have long known that the gender makeup of peer groups plays an important role in the outcomes of in-person learning. Now, with the rise of remote training, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand if those gender dynamics carry over to online settings. 

Tuck professor Julia Melin, and co-authors Tiantian Yang of the Wharton School and Sofoklis Goulas of Foundry10 and Yale University, address this question in a new paper recently published in Organization Science. In “With a Little Help from My (Girl) Friends: Field Evidence on Gender Homophily and Women’s Training Outcomes in Remote Environments,” they found that women assigned to all-women training groups were significantly more likely than those in mixed-gender groups to complete their training on time, earn professional certification in their chosen field, and secure in-field employment. Through an analysis of participants’ online communication patterns on the training platform, the researchers traced these differences to the identity-based trust all-women groups built in the absence of face-to-face interaction. They found that this form of trust facilitated both emotional and practical support, which in turn helped the women achieve their goals.

An Experiment in Online Learning

To examine the role of gender homophily—the technical term for the ease of collaboration and friendship among people of the same gender—the researchers planned and conducted their study over a 30-month period between June 2020 and December 2022 on a large, U.S.-based online career training platform they refer to as “CareerSpace.” The platform offers short-term, self-paced programs that help participants prepare for exams to obtain certifications in health care and IT fields such as phlebotomy and IT security. The randomized field experiment followed participants for 18 months and included more than 2,700 unemployed women enrolled on the platform. The study’s subjects were randomly selected to join either an all-women or mixed-gender virtual peer group, and people in the same group could interact with each other via online group forums, video conferencing, and online messaging. “We wanted to know,” Melin says, “if women perform better in remote training programs when they are grouped with other women, or when they are placed in mixed-gender groups.” 

A Clear Performance Gap

Comparing the outcomes of the two main cohorts, the differences were stark. In every measure, the all-women groups performed better than the mixed-gender groups. Women in all-women groups were 7 percentage points more likely to complete their training on time; 5 percentage points more likely to earn professional certification in their field of study; and 12 percentage points more likely to secure in-field employment within one year of their program start date. “In employment terms,” Melin says, “this means women in all-women groups were more than twice as likely to secure jobs in their field of study.” Interestingly, all-men groups didn’t see these same advantages. “Increasing the proportion of men in a group did not yield comparable benefits for male participants,” they write, “suggesting that gender homophily’s positive effects are potentially specific to all-women groups.”

Why All-Women Groups Work

In the second part of their study, Melin and her co-authors sought to understand what drove the advantages of gender-homophilous groups, so they analyzed their online communication patterns. In one strand of this analysis, they identified language reflecting themes such as identity-based connection, emotional and vulnerable expression, and knowledge sharing. This analysis showed that women in all-women groups established deeper relational ties than participants in mixed-gender groups. For instance, they were more likely to disclose shared identities and personal circumstances—such as gender, motherhood, marriage, or the uncertainty of career transition—which fostered vulnerability and mutual recognition. Moreover, women in these groups used more affective expression (pleasantness, excitement, closeness, etc.) and exchanged both instrumental and expressive resources such as job-relevant information, practical support, and peer encouragement. “What stood out to us,” Melin says, “was that in all-women groups, participants were more open about their personal experiences, more supportive of one another, and more likely to exchange practical advice. That trust translates into measurable differences in who finished, became certified, and ultimately got hired.”

Implications for the Future of Training

What do these findings mean for the future of job-training? Put simply, the composition of online learning peer groups can have a huge impact on the outcomes of participants. Remote environments strip away many of the informal cues that typically help people build trust—making peer group composition more consequential, not less. Access to these online skill-building platforms has increased significantly in recent years, but access isn’t everything. “Small, low-cost design choices—such as how peer groups are formed—can translate access into meaningful career mobility,” Melin says.