
Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women. - lian
http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1
======
marquis
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.

~~~
temphn
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.

~~~
marquis
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.

------
mike_h
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 contribution of this dynamic is kinda surprising to me.

~~~
ajscherer
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.

~~~
mike_h
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...](http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-
more-women/sb1)

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

~~~
jackpirate
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.

------
rokhayakebe
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.

~~~
alexgartrell
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)

~~~
rokhayakebe
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.

------
zzleeper
I've seen pretty convincing studies showing opposite results:
[http://www.econ.upf.edu/~iriberri/Personal_Web/Loreal_24_Feb...](http://www.econ.upf.edu/~iriberri/Personal_Web/Loreal_24_Feb_WEBPAGE.pdf)

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..

~~~
bellaire
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.

~~~
dhruval
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.

------
Shenglong
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 understand why this is, you need to comprehend the nature of the term
_mmorpg_. While it stands for "Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game",
it's been commonly dubbed as a half joke, "many men online role playing
girls". 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. Regardless of how sad this is, and how many e-dramas result, the
simple fact is that it benefits guilds. In fact, _every_ guild I can think of
that dominated any MMO I played had at least 1 attractive female.

Sexual drive is primitive and powerful; I think it goes a long way in
providing motivation for males. I'm thinking a similar thing goes on in the
work situation. I don't think it's all a function of diversity.

~~~
billyvg
"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).

~~~
whatwhatwhat
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. ;)

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biot
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.

~~~
marquis
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).

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asciilifeform
We cannot publicly evaluate the truth of this idea.

Because its negation is a "Thing You Can't Say" (TM).

~~~
r00fus
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".

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

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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.

------
olliesaunders
The data really doesn’t look that statistically significant to me:
[http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-
tea...](http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-
more-women/sb1)

~~~
trevelyan
N = 192 teams.

~~~
catch23
So is 192 the magic number? As long as we get 192 samples, we have enough data
for our experiment!

~~~
trevelyan
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.

------
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.

------
scottkrager
Print version (saves 2 clicks):

[http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-
tea...](http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-
more-women/ar/pr)

------
lmkg
Well, there is certainly more than 1 possible explanation for this data, and
because the real world is messy the real cause is probably more than 1 of
them. Other people have already mentioned increased competitiveness from males
and diversity of opinions. I'll offer another explanation, which fits well
with "traditional" gender roles: women are better at collaborative work and
facilitating collaboration among others.

------
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.)

------
vacri
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.

------
ora600
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.

~~~
ZoFreX
Surely this study has already been done? It seems like an obvious one to do.

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

~~~
ora600
Actually the article says "the more women the better". I don't think an all-
women group could count as diverse. The researchers explained the findings in
terms of "social sensitivity" and communication style, not diversity.

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scotty79
I wonder if group could perform better if they just chose the most capable
member and leave him with work. Rest could go grab a cup of coffee and gossip
a bit.

That's how groups deal with tasks in the real world.

------
omouse
...did these teams have managers or were they self-managed and fully
collaborative/co-operative? Because that may be a factor as well...

------
benihana
Women on a team correlates with a higher team IQ.

Higher IQ does not imply smarter.

Correlation does not imply causation.

