Part of me doesn’t like this. I believe that the differences between us as individuals is more important than the differences between our genders. That I am me and you are you regardless of our sex. But then as a writer and hopefully decent human being, I am also conscious that women are preposterously badly treated in the workplace. Don’t believe me? You’re probably a man. Not going to complain about it to me? You’ve noticed I’m not a woman.
Seriously: a woman writing what I just did would on average get more criticism than I’ll see. And if you genuinely doubt the maltreatment of women in business, go compare some salaries.
So there is a great part of me that rather likes research saying women make teams smarter. This research is saying that, while there are some other factors that come in to play, those are not the ones you’d predict about charismatic leaders or high bonus pays:
Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.
First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.
Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
Read the full piece.