[gogeek]

I am surprised that they say that more women lead to a better performance. There is no single female-dominated team that comes to my mind that achieved exceptional performance. All the great achievements and inventions of humanity, top notch startups, product teams etc. - all consisting of few or no women. Am I missing here something?

[corin_]

Without being an expert in the field, and to simplify it both in terms of the nature of the issue I'm talking about and in terms of suggesting there is a single reason for your question: if women don't get the same opportunities as men, it doesn't matter if they're a bit better or 10x as good, they still won't be part of the achievements.

Inventions of humanity: for much of history in many societies women wouldn't even be considered in consideration for working together with men.

Start-ups, etc.: In the 21st century we have a lot more gender equality, so that many (most?) of the men in the world wouldn't be shocked to work with a woman and consider them equals, but we still have a lot of subtle sexism; the glass ceiling hasn't disappeared.

Here's a good example with some recent data from 538 about gender inequality in movie directing: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/directing-is-even-more-of...

[tonyedgecombe]

Women's contributions tend to get airbrushed out of history, look at Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the discovery of DNA for instance.

[nl]

Note that they don't claim that a female dominated team improves performance, but that adding women to a male team improves its performance.

All the great achievements and inventions of humanity, top notch startups, product teams etc. - all consisting of few or no women

That's a pretty bold claim.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer. Chien Shiung Wu. Anne McKusick. Lilli Hornig. Colleen Black. Leona Woods Marshall.

Look them up. Consider the possibility that the fact that they aren't famous just as instructive as the fact that they exist.

[toolz]

I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that those women aren't famous as some sort of mark against societies sexism (presuming you might feel that way). There are a great number of men that aren't famous who have made significant contributions to science, and there do exist famous women who have contributed.

I'd venture to say most people know, Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, just to name a few whose names I recognize.

[gogeek]

I don't say they don't exist, but what's the ratio? It is also a fact that the higher the IQ gets, the more men we count.

[nl]

In this case it those specific people and their membership of a particular - fairly famous - team which I found significant.

I agree there are many more non-famous scientists than famous ones.

[gogeek]

"Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women."

They explicitly claim "more women = better performace" and not adding one woman improves the male team's performance.

I assume this is highly dependend on the task and male teams make up for their weaknesses with other qualities in the long-term, like ambition and persistency.

[nkohari]

You're missing a well-rounded worldview.

[k__]

Well, to say women didn't achieve anything is a bit far fetched...

But I had Bad impressions of female dominated teams too.

Most of the time they were paralized by discussions about stuff that just didn't matter.