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