[Gendergap] Women, collective intelligence, and Wikipedia

[Pete Forsyth]

Hi all,

Eugene Kim, the consultant who facilitated Wikimedia's amazing five-year strategic planning process, has just posted an interesting blog post (with his new consulting agency, Groupaya).

http://groupaya.net/blog/2011/10/do-women-make-groups-smarter/

An excerpt:

> Tom Malone is the director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. A few months ago, he published research with Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Woolley suggesting that groups with more women exhibited greater collective intelligence. It’s not that women have higher IQs than men. (Individual IQ had little correlation with collective intelligence.) It’s that women tend to exhibit more social sensitivity than men, and social sensitivity is a much stronger contributing factor to group intelligence.

Kim goes on to discuss the implications for Wikipedia, a project that is highly collaborative and mostly male. He concludes with the idea that, in the interest of pursuing more effective collaboration, Wikipedia would benefit from more participation by women.

A good read, I recommend it.
-Pete