Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#21

Post by Benjo »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #13

I 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.

Anecdote 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.

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#23

Post by billyvg »

Shenglong wrote: post #14

I'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 und…

"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).

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#24

Post by alexgartrell »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #13

I 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.

This 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)

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#25

Post by [deleted] »

mike_h wrote: post #12

When 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 cont…

[deleted]

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#27

Post by whatwhatwhat »

billyvg wrote: post #23
Shenglong wrote: post #14

I'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 und…

"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 "…

I 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. ;)

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#29

Post by ajscherer »

mike_h wrote: post #12

When 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 cont…

That 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.

Re: Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women.

#30

Post by irahul »

marquis wrote: post #9

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…

> 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?

Post reply on HN