[zzleeper]

I've seen pretty convincing studies showing opposite results: http://www.econ.upf.edu/~iriberri/Personal_Web/Loreal_24_Feb...

TLDR: Using data from business competitions (L'oreal, undergrad and MBAs), they studied the performance of groups of three students, controlling for a lot of things. Groups of 3 women were by far the worst performers, while the best were 2 men and 1 women.

Why may that be? no clue..

[bellaire]

That study is exclusively with smaller groups: 3 people. The social dynamics of a 3-person group are very different than a 10-person group as in this study. This probably has much to do with the different results.

[dhruval]

Actually the studies used groups from 2-5.

Here is a more scientific summary of the research... http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Woolley2010a.pdf

The interviewer just picked 10 as an arbitrary number. The researcher just went along with it.

[zzleeper]

Agreed. But then, 3-person groups are more common than 10-person groups (where it's hard to get anything done b/c everyone wants to speak and so on)