On Wednesday, MSNBC reported the findings of a new study:

"Woolley and Malone randomly assembled 18 to 60-year-olds into teams and had them solve a complex problem. After team members brainstormed, made decisions and completed visual puzzles, they were given an intelligence score based on their performance.

The study’s findings showed that the difference between low scoring and high scoring teams had nothing to do with an individual's intelligence, but rather with an individual's gender."

"If you want to make a team smarter, just add women." 

The finding wasn't surprising to me.  I already believed there to be a strong likelihood that women excel more than men when it comes to team related work.

I was glad to see the results of this study, because not only did it support my beliefs, it supported my previous writing!

New readers might be interested in seeing me connect the new study to previous writing of mine.  Let me review some writing that shared common topics with the study!

Let's look at an article I published November 11, 2010:

Should everyone be allowed to vote? 

1) I wrote the following about women: 

"Well, their genetic makeup (compared to men) involves more searching for consensus and reaching out to individuals to foster group harmony (this is probably evident by the common example: When a woman is in a bad mood she often wants to hear supportive words, not a solution)." 

So, is there something in the new study that supports my statement?

Yes:

"While researchers have replicated their findings twice, another researcher who worked on the project was hesitant to flat out say that groups of women are smarter than men.

'It’s not that I don’t trust the data. I do,' Woolley, who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told HBR. 'It’s just that part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance.'"

So, the study confirms my belief that women are more socially sensitive than men.


2) I wrote:

"The ideal situation is to allow only the best voters to vote, regardless of whether there are more women or men in this group."

Is there something in the new study that's supportive of my claim?

Yes:

When it comes to group performance, "...what's really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women."

So, we agree:  Don't select only from the group that is best at a given task.  Select only the people that are best at a given task, regardless of which group they come from!


Conclusion

Given that corporate work includes a significant amount of teamwork, and given that it appears women are better at such work than men, I wonder why there aren't more women in the corporate world?  After all, isn't money supposed to be the bottom line?  In the final analysis, don't corporations want to hire the people who will make them the most money?

Is gender discrimination so great that corporations are willing to overlook the teamwork advantage women have?  Or is it that people in corporations are typically unaware of the advantage women have, thinking them to be weaker since they are less overtly aggressive and and less masculine?

Is it possible that things have evolved to the point that immoral or corrupt action tends to advance one in the workforce, and is it possible that women are less immoral and corrupt than men?  Is it possible that women are more represented within corporate teams than they are relative to their representation among individual corporate roles?

These are all interesting questions, questions that I intend to explore in future articles!




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