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by zeno334
4434 days ago
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The Cornell study she links to doesn't really address whether gender diversity leads to better results. It talks about informational diversity, value diversity, and a bunch of other stuff all rather gender neutral. It also finds that it's informational diversity that seems to have the biggest positive impact. I'm not sure if gender diversity is necessarily that important to info diversity. The first page or so of that study is also fairly interesting in that it references a bunch of other studies which when taken together paint a rather ambiguous picture regarding the positive impact of any kind of diversity. I don't feel her second point says much about the need for gender diversity either. It seems to me that it's the people who use the internet that actually write this history rather than the people who merely build the architecture. I think it would be far more useful to see gender diversity in online arts, writing, social activism and so on, rather than in the teams who build that blog engine that allows all genders to express their ideas. I don't see how the last point has anything to do with gender either. If it's technology that will produce most jobs in the future then we should encourage all people to take more training in technology. I read the article precisely because I was interested in an answer to that why question and also because I was happy to read that she does not think asking this question is offensive (it's often the opposite). I'm not very satisfied with her answer though. I'd appreciate it if someone else could contribute to this discussion. |
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They looked at the effects of a few kinds of diversity on assigned work groups. They looked at "informational diversity", which they measured using educational background, job background, and position in the company; "social category diversity", which they took to be age and gender; and "value diversity", which they measured with a questionnaire.
Looking at their regression analyses, we see:
Informational diversity significantly increases actual performance (a number of .30), mildly decreases group efficiency (-.05), and mildly increases perceived performance (0.05), satisfaction (0.09), intent to remain (0.06), and commitment (.10).
Social category diversity moderately increases perceived performance (.16), satisfaction (.14), intent to remain (.12), and commitment (.16), while mildly decreasing actual performance (-.07) and group efficiency (-.03).
Value diversity moderately decreases group efficiency (-.17), actual performance (-.12), perceived performance (-.10), satisfaction (-.11), intent to remain (-.19), and commitment (-.19).