Women Make Us Smarter
Today is International Women’s Day and this year’s theme is #ChooseToChallenge, where we can all choose to call out gender bias and inequality when we see it. For the record, I am in. I will call out inequality and bias when I see it, knowing that I come from a male perspective that doesn’t always ‘pick up’ on things when they are happening.
While we challenge the biases and inequality facing women, and work to fill the gender data gap, I think we should also continually point to all of the benefits of having women stand equal to their male counterparts. There are many, but I’ll point to just one.
We are collectively smarter when we work in groups and we make better decisions when those groups include women.
In the same way we assess an individual’s intelligence, the collective intelligence of a group can be measured. In the 2010 Science article Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, collective intelligence is defined “as the general ability of the group to perform a wide variety of tasks.” The authors found that the intelligence of the group exceeded what could be predicted from combining the intelligence of the individuals. Further, they found that three things were correlated with collective intelligence: social sensitivity, equal opportunities to speak, and (you guessed it) proportion of women in the group.
Research into decision making reported in Forbes adds more insights. In a study involving 600 business decisions across 200 different business teams, the researchers found that teams made of up of women and men made better business decisions 73% of the time, when compared to individual decisions, while all-male teams were made better decisions 58% of the time. (By the way, groups with broad inclusivity (e.g., gender, age, location) made better decisions 87% of the time.
Why do we still have to fight inequality and challenge biases when it is so plain and clear that we are better together? Gender, colour, age, sexual orientation, religion, level of ability, and any other label we might want to use to create a division simply don’t serve us anymore.
Celebrate International Women’s Day and happy collaborating.
References:
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. As the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
