Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women. • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by wisty » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 5:58 AM UTC

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…

Girls tend to have a higher "conscientiousness" score on big 5. Which means they tend to work harder at delayed-gratification (or even no-gratification) work. Also, girls are often shy about getting the credit for things, and make good team players.

I guess you're right with men only working on these things if they are good at it - that's a survivor bias.

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

#62

Post by vacri » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 6:06 AM UTC

Gender differences only become useful when you're talking about fairly sizable populations. If your company is only 50 people, the individual personalities are far stronger in effect than gender differences. In short, it doesn't matter if "gender A performs better" if a few of the members of gender A you have play vicious office politics.

Individual differences swamp gender differences - the latter only come into play when populations are large.

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

#63

Post by temphn » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 8:34 AM UTC

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…

Unfortunately this entire article is pseudoscience. The obvious fact is that men have founded and built the vast majority of technology companies, manage most of the largest businesses, and built up most of modern science.

To state these obvious facts at Harvard is verboten; even if you are the President of Harvard University, you cannot speculate that there might be more men capable/motivated to do top notch science/engineering/business.

And forget about linking these observed differences to evolutionary underpinnings; while it is a fact that wealthier men reproduce more (and that in particular the very wealthy men through history could have almost unbounded numbers of children, while a woman can have at most 20 or so), this cannot be used as a theoretical basis for differing incentives to achieve greatness (from the conscious down to the evolutionary levels).

Instead we have to read articles like this, grinning and smiling and playing along. At some level even the authors must know that they are trying to disprove the obvious, commonsense point: men are simply more innovative, harder working, and more likely to have extremely high levels of technical ability. Women have other strengths but we are prevented from acknowledging those as well; biology denial is a peculiarly common feature of our modern era, soon to be washed away by science.

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

#64

Post by danssig » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 8:42 AM UTC

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)

Men tend to compartmentalize more. I may get red-in-the-face mad at a colleague about some stupid design decision that he's trying to ram down my throat and get pretty emotional in our discussions but that doesn't leak over into lunch conversations. That's a different side of the person. It's true that sometimes a guy will have a hard time moving from the work compartment. That's why we have rules like "whoever talks about work takes a shot".

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

#65

Post by marquis » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 8:57 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #63

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…

Unfortunately this entire article is pseudoscience. The obvious fact is that men have founded and built the vast majority of technology companies, manage most of the largest businesses, and built up most of modern science. To state these obvious facts at Harvard is verboten; even if you are the President of Harvard University, you cannot speculate that there might be more men capable/motivated to do top notch science…

I don't think this is about whether men are capable or not, that was never brought into question. It's about whether a team can work more efficiently if there is more of a mix of capabilities and interests.

The last paragraph of yours I'm going to pretend I didn't read, as I've probably met my gender-allocated quota of how hard I can work for the day, my sense of innovation is too limited to imagine that increased efficiency is possible and my technical knowledge means I really should be spending my time reading "How to pretend you know C, for Dummies", again, rather than procrastinating on the internet reading HN, most of which flies over my head.

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

#66

Post by robak » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 9:04 AM UTC

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…

So women are good for type-writing stuff only. Well, thank you.

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

#67

Post by nkassis » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 9:35 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #63

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…

Unfortunately this entire article is pseudoscience. The obvious fact is that men have founded and built the vast majority of technology companies, manage most of the largest businesses, and built up most of modern science. To state these obvious facts at Harvard is verboten; even if you are the President of Harvard University, you cannot speculate that there might be more men capable/motivated to do top notch science…

If I read this correctly, this article has nothing to do with Individual ability but of ability to work in groups. A lof of those rich successful men are loners. How many major new scientific theory have come out of a group? Quantum Theory maybe?

But in the end you are probably right, this isn't very solid science. But isn't it possible that woman have better group dynamics than all man groups?

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

#68

Post by trevelyan » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 10:18 AM UTC

catch23 wrote: post #40

trevelyan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N = 192 teams.

So is 192 the magic number? As long as we get 192 samples, we have enough data for our experiment!

When I did quant in grad school the magic number was around 30 in the sense you could presume anything less wasn't going to have much power. 192 passes my smell test for an expected distribution of classroom grades. By all means check the research, but I'd suspect "correlation is not causation" and "not a random sample" are more likely problems.

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

#69

Post by ugh » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 10:23 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #63

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…

Unfortunately this entire article is pseudoscience. The obvious fact is that men have founded and built the vast majority of technology companies, manage most of the largest businesses, and built up most of modern science. To state these obvious facts at Harvard is verboten; even if you are the President of Harvard University, you cannot speculate that there might be more men capable/motivated to do top notch science…

Why should I believe you?

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

#70

Post by Shenglong » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 12:36 PM UTC

kstenerud wrote: post #51

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…

The most organized guild I've been in, as an example, did not really have a governance structure. There was no such thing as DKP, and when a boss was down'd, everyone's immediate first question was "who needs this most?" - or rather, "who would bring the most benefit by taking this?" Raids were super smooth. In fact, on vent, we'd barely talk, other than to make jokes and tell stories.

Siege wars went well too. 40 of us vs over 200 people every time, and no one raged, and we never lost. This guild won siege for over 8 months straight without a single loss. I actually do have proof of this in the form of a 1gb video. I can upload it if you like. :P

Games now (I notice you mentioned Rifts) are different. I find most players now tend to be 30-50 year olds. I'm not sure why the shift in demographic...