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

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

#41

Post by rokhayakebe »

alexgartrell wrote: post #24
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)

You could be right. I have worked with 2 guys whom at some point clearly did not like me. However I respected the fact that it did not taint what I thought of their work, or their feedback on mine.

On the other hand I can remember a colleague of mine not talking to one of our teammates because of a personal reason. This, i think, affects business.

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

#42

Post by stcredzero »

Bizet 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.)

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

#43

Post by tel »

Assuming, 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.

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

#44

Post by dhruval »

bellaire wrote: post #10
zzleeper wrote: post #7

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.

Actually the studies used groups from 2-5.

Here is a more scientific summary of the research... http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Woolley2010a.pdf

The interviewer just picked 10 as an arbitrary number. The researcher just went along with it.

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

#45

Post by mnutt »

Benjo wrote: post #21
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.…

Bug 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.

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

#46

Post by r00fus »

asciilifeform wrote: post #26

We cannot publicly evaluate the truth of this idea. Because its negation is a "Thing You Can't Say" (TM).

Bullshit. 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".

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

#47

Post by jackpirate »

brettnak wrote: post #39
mike_h wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, 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-tea...

The variance, just from glancing at that chart seems extraordinarily high. I'd be very hesitant to draw conclusions.

Factoring 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.

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

#48

Post by rkarumanchi »

r00fus wrote: post #46
asciilifeform wrote: post #26

We cannot publicly evaluate the truth of this idea. Because its negation is a "Thing You Can't Say" (TM).

Bullshit. 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".

I think the asciilifeform meant to say 'converse' instead of 'negation'. I think the converse is a "Thing you can't say"

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

#49

Post by bluekeybox »

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…

> 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

I personally think that (a) nobody likes to do things they are not good at -- neither men nor women to an equal measure, and that (b) from a very young age, girls are encouraged to rely on other people for help and support, are taught that other people are important, and that it is important to be nice them. In addition, most girls in Western culture acquire far more superior image-making skills to those of boys since they learn how to present themselves at a relatively young age and since they compete with their peers on this basis, while boys compete mostly on who is physically stronger (a culture of violence). In addition, anti-social behaviors in boys such as physical intimidation tend to be looked over the shoulder while they are strongly discouraged in girls.

TL;DR: Men in our culture (except gay men) often never learn how to be social and how to communicate with people.

Another TL;DR: I can't understand how so many people tend to their children in completely different ways depending whether the child is a boy or a girl, and then act all surprised when they hear how gender-divided the society is.

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