6 ms·
Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.
- scottkrager 15y agoPrint version (saves 2 clicks): http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/pr http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
- dpritchett 15y agoTeam diversity of any kind increases the surface area of their collective experience.
- ora600 15y agoActually the article says "the more women the better". I don't think an all-women group could count as diverse. The researchers explained the findings in terms of "social sensitivity" and communication style, not diversity.
- bellaire 15y agoFrom the article: "Our ongoing research suggests that teams need a moderate level of cognitive diversity for effectiveness. Extremely homogeneous or extremely diverse groups aren’t as intelligent."
- ora600 15y agoFollow up research I'd like to see: Some research has been done on effective group problem solving. There are several possible methods - pick a leader and let him decide, reach consensus, majority decision, etc. Some have been shown to be more effective than the rest. Teach an effective method to all groups, and see if there is still any difference.
- ZoFreX 15y agoSurely this study has already been done? It seems like an obvious one to do.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- zzleeper 15y agoI've seen pretty convincing studies showing opposite results: http://www.econ.upf.edu/~iriberri/Personal_Web/Loreal_24_Feb_WEBPAGE.pdf http://www.econ.upf.edu/~iriberri/Personal_Web/Loreal_24_Feb... TLDR: Using data from business competitions (L'oreal, undergrad and MBAs), they studied the performance of groups of three students, controlling for a lot of things. Groups of 3 women were by far the worst performers, while the best were 2 men and 1 women. Why may that be? no clue..
- bellaire 15y agoThat study is exclusively with smaller groups: 3 people. The social dynamics of a 3-person group are very different than a 10-person group as in this study. This probably has much to do with the different results.
- zzleeper 15y agoAgreed. But then, 3-person groups are more common than 10-person groups (where it's hard to get anything done b/c everyone wants to speak and so on)
- dhruval 15y agoActually the studies used groups from 2-5. Here is a more scientific summary of the research... http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Woolley2010a.pdf http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Woolley2010a.pdf The interviewer just picked 10 as an arbitrary number. The researcher just went along with it.
- biot 15y agoThe article doesn't touch on this aspect, but I was expecting it to say something about a mixed gender team doing better because members of one sex will try harder to impress members of the other sex. In other words, some form of evolutionary competition would kick in.
- marquis 15y agoFrom my experience I would certainly say there's an aspect to that (me, as a woman, wanting to impress the intelligent men in the group).
- marquis 15y agoI'm working with a group of teenagers right now on a long-term technical project and my observations are that the boys are fantastic for giving immediate, interesting ideas but aren't interested in documenting their work. The only volunteers to maintain the project documentation were girls, who are also willing to spend their own time outside of the class on this. This is just an observation, mind, and I may be biased as I'm a woman but I consistently have found in the workplace that women are happier to do documentation/project management than men. Where the opposite is true, the men are often exceedingly good at the task. Would it be positing to tentatively suggest that men don't generally like to do things that they don't think they are good at, whereas women innately like to see a project successfully managed and will do what work is needed for the common goal? I would certainly place myself in this case, where I step in to make sure things are done regardless of my 'position' in the group.
- orangecat 15y agoThis is just an observation, mind, and I may be biased as I'm a woman but I consistently have found in the workplace that women are happier to do documentation/project management than men. This matches my experience exactly. The last two project managers I've worked with have been women, and they've been fantastic at doing the documentation and organization that would drive me crazy if I had to. And it wasn't their formal titles; just as you said, they assumed the role because they saw that it needed to be done. The first one liked it so much that she got PMI certified and now has a much better job. Would it be positing to tentatively suggest that men don't generally like to do things that they don't think they are good at I don't think anybody does. But it may be more than that; I'm halfway decent at technical writing, and I don't like it at all. Not sure why.
- irahul 15y ago> whereas women innately like to see a project successfully managed and will do what work is needed for the common goal? Just curious, does this "what work is needed for the common goal" extended to things which were complex compared to regular tasks? Or was it more on the documentation/project management side which the women showed initiative in?
- mike_h 15y agoWhen women are around, there's more at stake for men. They need to be more competitive but also more well-behaved (they're being judged not just on performance but also on character). There could be an analogous effect on the women, I don't know. In my Silicon Valley experience, a team without women is a disadvantaged team indeed, and not just because they make the men better. But not acknowledging the potential contribution of this dynamic is kinda surprising to me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ajscherer 15y agoThat doesn't really explain why the groups with 100% women did so well, or why the groups that were 50/50 did worse than the groups of all men or all women. Maybe I'm trying to take more information from the chart than is really there.
- mike_h 15y agoHm, I missed that link to the chart before, and I was trying to respond to the "cognitive diversity -> effectiveness" discussion. You're right: it's hard to see the chart supporting my claim. (There are some hints at a sweet spot there in the middle, except for that drop at 50/50!) Link to chart: http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/sb1 http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
- brettnak 15y agoThe variance, just from glancing at that chart seems extraordinarily high. I'd be very hesitant to draw conclusions.
- jackpirate 15y agoFactoring in the variance, it looks to me like groups that had an even split did the best. Groups predominantely of one gender suffered. The "women are better" trend line may partially be accounted for from the fact that there were simply more groups with more men.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI have worked with women who are clearly smarter than everyone else in the room, and take the entire group to a new level. However with every guy I have worked with we can argue the entire meeting (and maybe get emotional), but then at lunch time it's like it never happened. From my experience, if you argue with most (not all) women in the conference room, do not expect her to forget about it the next day.
- Benjo 15y agoAnecdote alert: A female coworker who was also a close friend of mine sent me an issue, asking me if it was related to an issue I had debugged. It was, and the issue was not assigned, so I took it and closed it as duplicate. She was pissed. She wanted to know if it was a simple issue so she could assign it to herself, close it easily and get credit for it. (Not that our group really used that as a performance metric.) She actually said to me: "That was really unprofessional you ass!" I tried to gently suggest that she might be taking it too personally. If I had realized she wanted to close the issue herself, I probably would have let her. I just closed it myself because it was faster. Later she told me that she had read in a book that women tend to become more emotionally invested in their work than men do. I told her I was glad she had read that in a book.
- mnutt 15y agoBug trackers are often pretty terrible at promoting passive aggressive behavior as well, if you don't have good communication with the person on the other end. Reasons to close often look like: INVALID, DUPLICATE, WONTFIX, WORKSFORME.
- alexgartrell 15y agoThis is a stereotype that has never panned out for me. Most of the time when you think the men have "let it go," they've just passive aggressively suppressed it. I'd rather deal with someone who is obviously pissed at me than someone who is secretly pissed at me any day of the week. (The passive aggressive thing has been much, much more prevalent amongst nerds, in my experience, compounding the problem)
- Shenglong 15y agoI'd like to interject, although this is purely based off observation in a different setting, and I have absolutely no proof whatsoever... so the disclaimer is there: I used to be a very avid gamer in a lot of different MMOs. Back when 16-22 year-olds were still the dominant demographic for MMOs, I observed something: guilds with at least a few girls tended to be much stronger overall than guilds with no women. To understand why this is, you need to comprehend the nature of the term mmorpg. While it stands for "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game", it's been commonly dubbed as a half joke, "many men online role playing girls". The significance is essentially that women are rare, and males take any chance they get to flirt with any good looking girls who end up playing the game. Regardless of how sad this is, and how many e-dramas result, the simple fact is that it benefits guilds. In fact, every guild I can think of that dominated any MMO I played had at least 1 attractive female. Sexual drive is primitive and powerful; I think it goes a long way in providing motivation for males. I'm thinking a similar thing goes on in the work situation. I don't think it's all a function of diversity.
- billyvg 15y ago"The significance is essentially that women are rare, and males take any chance they get to flirt with any good looking girls who end up playing the game." I fail to see the significance of this, how does a male flirting with a female in an MMO benefit the guild at all? In fact I would even say that having females in the guild is more detrimental to the guild. You have a bunch of males trying to flirt with that one "good looking" girl in the guild, and what do you get? Drama. And that drama eventually leads into the downfall of the guild. I don't think you can compare the environment of a professional setting with that of a video game (in this case at least).
- whatwhatwhat 15y agoI think the implication is that the presence of women leads to higher performance among men, as well as any other traits that women contribute to the group. I think it's a give and take overall, and I bet women get better around men too. We are symbiotic after all. ;)
- 15y ago
- olliesaunders 15y agoThe data really doesn’t look that statistically significant to me: http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/sb1 http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...
- trevelyan 15y agoN = 192 teams.
- tst 15y agoThat doesn't mean so much if you don't know the effect size and variance. In the end you have to look at the confidence intervals.
- catch23 15y agoSo is 192 the magic number? As long as we get 192 samples, we have enough data for our experiment!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- trevelyan 15y agoWhen I did quant in grad school the magic number was around 30 in the sense you could presume anything less wasn't going to have much power. 192 passes my smell test for an expected distribution of classroom grades. By all means check the research, but I'd suspect "correlation is not causation" and "not a random sample" are more likely problems.
- lmkg 15y agoWell, there is certainly more than 1 possible explanation for this data, and because the real world is messy the real cause is probably more than 1 of them. Other people have already mentioned increased competitiveness from males and diversity of opinions. I'll offer another explanation, which fits well with "traditional" gender roles: women are better at collaborative work and facilitating collaboration among others.
- omouse 15y ago...did these teams have managers or were they self-managed and fully collaborative/co-operative? Because that may be a factor as well...
- asciilifeform 15y agoWe cannot publicly evaluate the truth of this idea. Because its negation is a "Thing You Can't Say" (TM).
- r00fus 15y agoBullshit. The refutation of this would be titled something like: "Team smartness doesn't rely on sex of individuals". That's not a "Thing you can't say".
- rkarumanchi 15y agoI think the asciilifeform meant to say 'converse' instead of 'negation'. I think the converse is a "Thing you can't say"
- sp332 15y agoThe opposite would just blame society for not training girls to be leaders, or something.
- benihana 15y agoWomen on a team correlates with a higher team IQ. Higher IQ does not imply smarter. Correlation does not imply causation.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- stcredzero 15y agoBizet wrote this very idea into the opera Carmen. He wrote a song basically saying, "If you want your enterprise to prosper, you must have women along." (Though in the song it's good fortune rather than intelligence which is enhanced in this way.)
- tel 15y agoAssuming, as it seems, that this is a good, well-designed randomized experiment such that contaminating variables between group gender ratios and collective intelligence are scrambled, it's still worth keeping in mind that correlation is not causation. So, completely apolitically, this seems to be an initial result that's only been replicated twice. It still needs to be borne out as to whether it holds more generally. The researchers seem to have a pretty plausible theory to explain the results, though, and further testing should show more insight. But secretly I'm going to hold back a smallish bet that this'll be one of those "disappearing" effects that social scientists have been complaining about recently.
- zeteo 15y agoThe study is very artificial. These teams were randomly formed and immediately subjected to tests. This is not indicative of the team's performance in the long run. If anything, it points towards the fact that women are probably more trusting of, and cooperative towards, complete strangers.
- scotty79 15y agoI wonder if group could perform better if they just chose the most capable member and leave him with work. Rest could go grab a cup of coffee and gossip a bit. That's how groups deal with tasks in the real world.
- vacri 15y agoGender differences only become useful when you're talking about fairly sizable populations. If your company is only 50 people, the individual personalities are far stronger in effect than gender differences. In short, it doesn't matter if "gender A performs better" if a few of the members of gender A you have play vicious office politics. Individual differences swamp gender differences - the latter only come into play when populations are large.