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

Team diversity of any kind increases the surface area of their collective experience.

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.

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..

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 biased as I'm a woman but I consistently have found in the workplace that women are happier to do documentation/project management than men. Where the opposite is true, the men are often exceedingly good at the task. 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 and will do what work is needed for the common goal? I would certainly place myself in this case, where I step in to make sure things are done regardless of my 'position' in the group.