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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.

#51

Post by kstenerud »

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…

I saw the exact opposite. The guilds that performed the best, got first kill, turned the newest content into farm status the quickest, were guilds that had one man at the top.

He would have officers to whom he would delegate most of the operations, and with whom he would confer as the guild was tackling new content, but in the end his word was final. And it worked wonderfully until eventually the leader left without appointing someone competent enough to fill his shoes.

It was the complete opposite with "committee" based guilds. Everything there was about your standing in the council, who you could bring to "your side", infighting, inertia, analysis paralysis, cliques, rifts, you name it. It was a mess, and most raid nights were spent dying in very stupid and careless ways. DKP hoarding and loot cockblocking would become commonplace. Morale would plummet, the good players would leave, and eventually the guild would fold, be absorbed, or just wallow in suckiness.

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

#52

Post by zeteo »

The 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.

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

#53

Post by johnl »

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…

I don't know if it's the male/female thing. I think it is a "amount of discussion" thing. Women discuss the topic more without being positional so a larger quorum is reached. The men are too hierarchy oriented which results in a small quorum. So 50% would be optimum, the women force the discussion, the men force the decision. %100 women would not be optimal but still better than the men.

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

#55

Post by marquis »

irahul wrote: post #37
marquis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, and I really am generalizing here based on experience, that girls/women less mind doing a task that doesn't directly benefit them. It may also be that girls don't mind being perceived as bossy? Management often dictates that you ask others in your group to complete tasks within a timeframe and girls may already be prepared for this (going into difficult territory here) by learning from their mothers run a ho…

> girls/women less mind doing a task that doesn't directly benefit them. I don't follow. Are you saying documentation doesn't benefit the assignee directly and coding does? > Management often dictates that you ask others in your group to complete tasks within a timeframe and girls may already be prepared for this We have different definitions of initiative here(I am putting words in your mouth. You said girls are mor…

> Are you saying documentation doesn't benefit the assignee directly and coding does?

Yes, in our current culture of software development. Perhaps less so in academic culture, and certainly not in literary culture. But in software development documentation is not seen as a glamorous task, even though we all know that good documentation makes for a better product.

>Asking others that it gets done, provided you have the authority to do so, isn't actually initiative

Sure, I agree with you.

>I will ask the other two to get the documentation done, even though we are peers.

What if this was an open source project? Or a school project, or any project where you weren't reimbursed somehow. I like to look to these examples to see how a 'natural' system would develop, because it's too easy to place false systems on a business structure where you use payment to get people do what you want. If you can use a naturally-occuring system, it would seem that any project model would then thrive naturally. Hope I am making sense here.

>if you are working on a regular programming project, and a module requires more work than the others, who was more likely to pick it?

Well, that depends on the project goals, and I'd be making too many (more) assumptions here if I were to give examples of what I thought might happen in theory. Ultimately it's up to the individual.

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

#56

Post by marquis »

biot wrote: post #8

The 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.

From 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).

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

#58

Post by callmeed »

bluekeybox wrote: post #49
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, a…

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.

I give my kids (IMO) more or less equal care but the divisions are still there. It's in the toy aisles, the clothes, the TV/movies, etc.

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

#59

Post by chrischen »

ajscherer wrote: post #29
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.

Could be that in groups without women, men underperform because of a lack of stimulation.

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

#60

Post by nl »

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…

I think this is the most important part, and provides the best explanation of the results:

part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance. Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.

So it isn't men being more competitive - it's that teams with people who work well with others generally perform better. On average women are more "socially sensitivity" so more women will, on average, imply a better team.

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