Harvard Business Review: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women. (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 guess you're right with men only working on these things if they are good at it - that's a survivor bias.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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).

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.

That's not a "Thing you can't say".

"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."