More Women, Better Teams

The case for diversity on teams usually relies on a couple of arguments. First, people of different backgrounds bring different ideas and approaches, giving a team more ideas to choose from when problem solving. Second, it helps to have the teams’ backgrounds more closely match the customer’s: more diverse teams reach more diverse audiences.

But there’s an even more compelling reason to add women in particular to teams.? According to Professor Anita Woolley’s acclaimed research, “If a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.” Why? It is instructive to dig in.

Woolley’s group found that a team’s collective intelligence is not based on averaging the members’ individual intelligence. Instead, they identified three contributing factors: higher average social sensitivity (the ability of individuals to work well with one another), equality of conversational turn-taking, and a higher proportion of females.

They also found interconnections between the three variables: women scored higher on social sensitivity (researchers called the test “Reading the Mind in the Eyes”) and generally dominated conversations less. Thus, the presence of more women on a team increases the other two variables, contributing to collective intelligence.

Adding one woman to every team isn’t enough: a University Economics department studied two types of gender diverse groups, some with one woman and two men, others with two women and one man. Guess which teams proved more effective? The ones with more women: according to their findings, “people in minority positions, like a woman on an all-male team, are reluctant to go against the group by sharing knowledge that contradicts the narrative.” A lone woman on a team might not feel safe enough to fully contribute, (which is why we always try to match at least two women in circles like YPO Forum).

This correlates with what Google’s Project Aristotle discovered when studying effective teams. They identified psychological safety as the number one contributor to team effectiveness, which refers to how safe team members feel taking risks. Whether it’s sharing a new idea or admitting a mistake, teams with a high level of safety perform better.?

Not that Easy

Despite these findings, and the proven commercial benefits, progress is now backsliding. When it comes to gender diversity, the pandemic added another layer of complexity: recent global events disrupted the rise of women in leadership. For years, the corporate sector saw slow steady progress: according to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Report, the number of women hired increased 1% annually leading up to 2020. Yet in the first quarter of 2023, the percentage of women in senior leadership receded.

Over the past year, we’ve gathered women in leadership together in learning circles to discuss inclusion. Some teeter on the edge of burnout, sharing sentiments like: People don’t talk or listen enough.

I feel tokenized by all the men on my team.

I’m trying to get those I work with to have more empathy.

If people would ask more questions, we could uncover commonalities.

We’ve seen tremendous interest from women in leadership positions in our work at Circles, and we’re hoping that we can help support them in building more inclusive teams and cultures.

Moving Beyond Gender

Here’s a question Professor Woolley posed recently in her research: “Could a group’s collective intelligence be increased by, for example, better electronic collaboration tools?.” We think so. Regardless of how many women you’re able to hire and retain, we’re trying to make it easy to apply learnings from both Woolley’s research and Project Aristotle. We’re helping people stay present and grow in listening skills. We focus on meeting openers, norms, and pauses to reflect, ensuring all voices have a chance to be heard. In our experience, a bit of recurring practice at this transforms team dynamics, simulating the benefits of social sensitivity.

We're gratified to have thousands of CEOs joining us in our great experiment, moving research like Professor Woolley's into practice. To learn more about our work supporting high-performing teams, connect with us today.

Written by Samantha Holland