The Key to Success in Business and Life...WOMEN?

This stat blew my mind:

Collective intelligence increases in proportion to the number of women on a team.

Note what does NOT increase Collective intelligence:

• IQ

• Group Satisfaction

• Group Cohesion

  Group Motivation

Surpised? Me too!

But I’m not surprised that women make teams better.

I’ve always thought that diverse perspectives and life experiences add value to any group gathering. Gender, race, education, religion, and geography add richness to even the smallest gatherings. But collective intelligence—that’s a new one!

Women make teams work smarter.

I find this fascinating because even though we live in a day and age when women truly can do anything, it hasn’t always been that way.

For many years, women were barred from many professions. The first professionally trained woman doctor didn’t start practicing medicine until 1849. That might seem like a long time ago, but considering the fact that women didn’t start entering medical school in larger numbers until the 1970s, progress has been slow at best. In some states, women were forbidden to own businesses or property. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 that employers were expressly forbidden from discriminating based on sex (in addition to religion, race, color, and national origin.) And believe it or not, a woman couldn’t even get a credit card without a male co-signer until the mid 1970s.

Fun Fact:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt may have been ahead of his time when he appointed Frances Perkins as the Secretary of Labor. In 1933, she became the first woman to hold a Cabinet position in a U.S. president's administration. (Currently, women make up more than half of President Biden’s cabinet.)

The researcher in the Harvard study points out that this increase in collective intelligence may be because women score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. “What do you hear about great groups?” Anita Woolley asks. “Not that the members are all really smart but that they listen to each other. They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.”

These findings correlate with Duhigg’s research in his book, Supercommunicators. Though he doesn’t specifically delineate between men and women, he does note that “supercommunicators,” the people who have the best ability to bring about connectivity within groups, are the people who listen closely to what’s said and unsaid, ask the right questions, match the mood of the room, and make their own feelings easy to perceive. I don’t know about you, but I find that many of the women I know often complain that their husbands are emotionally unavailable or uninterested in what their wives are thinking and feeling. (Honey, if you’re reading this, I’m not talking about you!)

Of course, we all want to believe that we are modern thinkers, that we value diversity in every setting, but the reality is that what we believe and how we act don’t always align.

Fourteen percent of the most influential companies in the world don’t have a single female board member. One surprising finding was in the area of fashion. Women, who spend nearly twice the annual amount on clothing every year than men, are notoriously underrepresented across the world in this industry. Just one third of apparel companies assessed publicly commit to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. Of these, just 16% set specific targets. One of my daughter’s favorite stores, Brandy Melville, is notoriously misogynistic. For years, I thought Ms. Melville was the brains behind the brand, but in reality, the founder is a man named Silvio Marsan and his son, Stefan, and Brandy Melville herself is actually the fictional tale of two people – Brandy, an American girl, and Melville, an English guy who met in Rome and fell in love and inspired the brand’s name and logo.

Some careers are equally filled by both men and women (marketing, human resources, and education). In recent years, some traditionally male-dominated industries are including more females.. Parity in both work and pay is on the rise! We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that equality is finally happening in industries like law enforcement, accounting and finance, culinary arts, and science. What IS surprising is that it took so long! Think about it—in two parent households, women generally make most of the purchase decisions for the family. They assume the role of disciplinarian, manage the cooking, and experiment daily, whether it’s helping with the 8th grade science project or trying to figure out how to grow a lemon tree in a climate not conducive to lemon trees.

It makes perfect sense that they would enter the workforce and want to be paid for these roles.

What can we learn?

I think it’s fair to say that any gathering that’s ALL MALE or ALL FEMALE will not be as strong as it could be.

The key to making smart decisions in any setting is to keep an open mind and allow all voices to be heard. Think about how you can incorporate this principle of equality in your families, book clubs, small groups, and business meetings. I also think it’s important for women to realize that there is NO reason to be intimidated in a room full of men. Because YOU are there, that room is smarter than they would be without you there. Wherever you go, your presence makes the place better.

The takeaway: To any male who happens to be reading this post:

If you want to be successful, make sure you have some women on your team.

Hey, the research proves it!

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There's No Such Thing as a One Dimensional Life

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March is Women’s History Month, so this month I’ll be focusing on themes relating to women in the workplace, at school, at home, and of course among our peers. Let’s honor one another today and always!

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PREJUDICE? WHO? ME?

You know me. I’ve always got a book in my hand, and this week, I just finished Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. Tucked among all the interesting research and anecdotes was a little tidbit about women that got me thinking. Because he was talking about identity, I was intrigued. You see, identity is a buzzword in the Christian community, and I’ve always felt it’s been a bit overused. (Like, GAH, talk to me about something else besides identity already!)

But here goes….

In a 2005 study at Texas Christian University, a researcher told a group of male and female students that he was studying GRE performance. The lead researcher told the students that he was studying this because of the well-known theory that men typically outperform women on these tests. (He said this on purpose to ensure that the stereotype would be at the forefront of the students’ minds while they took the test. )

Then the researchers divided the students into three groups.

• Group #1: Went to a room and took the test with no further instructions.

• Group #2: Were told to think about their identity in a general way and were given an example that showed a bubble chart with the word “ME” in the middle and then three or four branching bubbles that included words like “student,” “sister, “ and “employee.”

• Group #3: Were also told to think about their identity, but to use as many branching bubbles as they could muster. This group saw an example that included the words listed above but additional descriptors like “advice giver,” “animal lover,” and “dean’s list.”

The researchers wanted to see if the stereotype threat could be mitigated by reminding individual women of their multiples roles and identities.

WHAT I LEARNED

I didn’t think this would be such a big deal, but even women who are high achievers in the area of math often score twenty points BELOW men in tests where ability is measured. Specifically, they do worse on timed assignments. They run out of time because they’re subconsciously thinking, “I need to double-check. I need to be careful.” Anxiety and distraction slow them down.

So you can probably guess what happened in the experiment I just described. The women who were not told to think about their multiple identities or who were only asked to describe themselves in a very basic way, scored lower than those women who were given ample time to think about and write down their various identities, the clubs they belonged to, the offices they held, their roles in their families, sororities, and sports teams. In fact, the women who internalized their identity scored the same as the men!

According to Duhigg, “the existence of the stereotype generated just enough anxiety and distraction to slow the women down, which resulted in lower test scores,”—twenty points is a big deal!

THE MULTITUDES

I share this story because even though most of the women reading this blog will probably never take another college entrance exam, you will encounter situations where you may perceive yourself as the underdog. And maybe that’s because you’ve spent a couple of decades raising kids at home and now you’re ready to enter a different kind of workforce. Maybe you’ve been asked to join a board and you feel unqualified or unprepared. Maybe you’re leading a volunteer team that’s composed primarily of men who think they have all the answers.

Negative self talk loses its force when we as women think about who we are in as many categories as possible. We can render powerless all those voices telling us we’re not smart enough or good enough if we just remember that we contain multitudes. Our identities are not so one-dimensional.

I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll never forget meeting a new friend after my oldest daughter was born. We introduced ourselves, and then she asked, “So are you just a mom?” Of course, all I heard was that little qualifier..JUST…JUST…JUST….

You’re not a JUST anything, and neither am I. We contain multitudes, and that’s a good thing because that means we can connect with people on so many levels. Remembering that we are more than what we seem and that others are too (and this is key) is a valuable tool for empathy, understanding, connection, and progress in both work and relationships.

Of course, as a Christian, I would be remiss if I didn’t also say that while remembering who we are is important, remembering WHOSE we are is paramount. Any one component of our identity is actually pretty fragile. Your position at work, your role at home, your status in your community—all those things can change in an instant. Even so, my friend, we shall be forevermore children of God. You can take great comfort in knowing that.

For more reflections on identity, read this and this.

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