Women Make Teams Smarter

A recent Carnegie Mellon University study had this interesting finding:  "There's little correlation between a group's collective intelligence and the IQs of the individual members.  But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises."

In this study, reported in Harvard Business Review (June 2011), researchers gave IQ tests to subjects, and then randomly assigned them to teams.  Each team was asked to complete several tasks, including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles, and to solve one complex problem.  Teams were given intelligence test scores based on their performance.  Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn't earn much higher scores, those that had more women did. 

Some observations from the researchers:

"Many of the factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not.  Things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation — none were correlated with collective intelligence. 

"The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group.  But so far, the data show, the more women, the better....  We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end — that there should be a little gender diversity, rather than all women.

"What do you hear about great groups?  Not that the members are all really smart, but that they listen to each other.  They share criticism constructively.  They have open minds.  They are not autocratic.  And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups."

*Recall information based on data from CPSC.gov

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