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Team diversity of any kind increases the surface area of their collective experience.
"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."
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.
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.
I'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 biase…
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.
I've seen pretty convincing studies showing opposite results: 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..
That 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.
Follow 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.