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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This matches my experience exactly. The last two project managers I've worked with have been women, and they've been fantastic at doing the documentation and organization that would drive me crazy if I had to. And it wasn't their formal titles; just as you said, they assumed the role because they saw that it needed to be done. The first one liked it so much that she got PMI certified and now has a much better job.
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
I don't think anybody does. But it may be more than that; I'm halfway decent at technical writing, and I don't like it at all. Not sure why.
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.
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.
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?
It is thankless work. I've been spearheading a continuous deployment project for my team here at microsoft. A team with fairly poor documentation. As much as everyone laments on this issue I get push back from my managers on writing specs, documenting components etc, instead of simply throwing together something no one understands or knows how to work with.
> whereas women innately like to see a project successfully managed and will do what work is needed for the common goal?
Just curious, does this "what work is needed for the common goal" extended to things which were complex compared to regular tasks? Or was it more on the documentation/project management side which the women showed initiative in?
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 household.
> 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 more likely to take tasks which needs to be done and I am calling it initiative). Initiative for me is there is a task which needs to be done and no one wants to do it because it's difficult or unpleasant, and you voluntarily do it.
Asking others that it gets done, provided you have the authority to do so, isn't actually initiative. Authority is defined loosely here. Consider I am working with 3 people and I have done most of the coding. I will ask the other two to get the documentation done, even though we are peers.
My original question was more on the lines of 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.) She actually said to me: "That was really unprofessional you ass!" I tried to gently suggest that she might be taking it too personally. If I had realized she wanted to close the issue herself, I probably would have let her. I just closed it myself because it was faster.
Later she told me that she had read in a book that women tend to become more emotionally invested in their work than men do. I told her I was glad she had read that in a book.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
The correlation may mean nothing. Perhaps the strong guilds managed to attract women, because the leadership was able to manage the boys to behave better.
It's wrong to say that better guilds had women, so women cause better guilds. The only thing you can say is that annectodally the better guilds had women.
"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).
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. ;)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
"Our ongoing research suggests that teams need a moderate level of cognitive diversity for effectiveness. Extremely homogeneous or extremely diverse groups aren’t as intelligent."
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.
