Apply HN: Over 40% of women leave tech mid-career, help us decrease that

Post by danielvf » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 1:49 AM UTC

userium wrote: post #20

In the intro we wrote quite shortly about our company, so here is some more information about our motivation for doing this: It's known that diversity improves organisational performance and competitiveness. Diverse teams improve ROI, increase innovation and solve problems better. Still only 25% of the IT workforce are women, and over 40% of them leave tech mid-career. We think people who build technology should repr…

I thought the latest meta studies showed that there was not a significant positive correlation between diversity and organizational/team performance? I was doing a SciFi diversity gaming challenge, and went reading papers. I was really surprised to find that

"The evidence based on meta-analyses, which systematically aggregate the results from all relevant studies, tentatively suggests that gender diversity within teams does not exert any influence on team performance (Webber & Donahue, 2001; Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007; Joshi & Roh, 2009; Schneid et al., 2014). A notable exception is the meta-analysis by Bell et al. (2011), which evidences a negative association between gender diversity and team performance..."

Post by userium » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 3:45 PM UTC

danielvf wrote: post #21

userium wrote: post #20

In the intro we wrote quite shortly about our company, so here is some more information about our motivation for doing this: It's known that diversity improves organisational performance and competitiveness. Diverse teams improve ROI, increase innovation and solve problems better. Still only 25% of the IT workforce are women, and over 40% of them leave tech mid-career. We think people who build technology should repr…

I thought the latest meta studies showed that there was not a significant positive correlation between diversity and organizational/team performance? I was doing a SciFi diversity gaming challenge, and went reading papers. I was really surprised to find that "The evidence based on meta-analyses, which systematically aggregate the results from all relevant studies, tentatively suggests that gender diversity within tea…

> "I thought the latest meta studies showed that there was not a significant positive correlation between diversity and organizational/team performance?"

Yes, however diversity can create better performance when it comes to 'out of the ordinary' creative tasks, e.g. product development. There are benefits for innovation and getting fresh ideas. But there are different types of diversity that can generate various sorts of conflict, which affect how a team performs. The benefits of diversity don't occur overnight, but can improve performance if managed successfully. [1]

The studies you mentioned (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007; Joshi and Roh, 2009) had mixed findings because they observed different aspects of diversity (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, and demographic diversity) and analyzed the relationship between these and team outcomes.

[1] Jayne & Dipboye, 2004. Leveraging diversity to improve business performance.

Re: Apply HN: Over 40% of women leave tech mid-career, help us decrease that

Re: Apply HN: Over 40% of women leave tech mid-career, help us decrease that