When Women Predominate in Groups

Women in Engineering or Information Technology organizations may find themselves the only person using the Women’s restroom.
In contrast, men have a similar experience in organizations like Human Resources, Marketing, or Communications.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Vicki Belt

Commenting on this experience, Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter advised women who wish to advance to ”avoid the Ps: Personnel, Public Relations, Purchasing, to avoid being “pigeonholed in a female ghetto”, as documented by Vicki Belt, then of University of Newcastle.
Even technical women seek avoid female-dominated groups.

Tessa West

Research by NYU’s Tessa West, Madeline Heilman, Lindy Gullett, and Joe Magee with Corinne Moss-Racusin of Yale University suggests that both women and men may hold implicit biases against women-dominated groups.

Madeline Heilman

This research team organized five-person groups to perform “a male-typed cooperative task” as quickly as possible.
Groups differed in proportion of women to men:

2 women and 3 men
3 women and 2 men
4 women and 1 man.

Lindy Gullett

The groups with more women performed equally well as the group with more men.

Joe Magee

However, as the number of women increased in the work groups, participants’ evaluations of the group’s effectiveness decreased, as did ratings of participants’ contributions — regardless of gender.
Both men and women in the same group judged their own team mates more harshly when their groups have a greater proportion of women.

Corinne Moss-Racusin

After 10 weeks, those who worked in groups with more women said they were less interested in working together again.

West and team suggest that women in work groups may be subject to “stigma-by-association,” when negative evaluations of a stigmatized individual spread to an associated individual.

Men who work with women may be subject to the “contagion effect” and may be perceived as having similar stereotypic strengths and weaknesses as women.

Carol Kulik

Hugh Bainbridge

The prevalence of stigma-by-association in the workplace was conceptualized by University of South Australia’s Carol Kulik with Hugh Bainbridge of University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne’s Christina Cregan.

In this “masculine” performance task, women may have been evaluated according to the stereotype that women are less competent at “masculine” tasks, and group members may have been similarly evaluated through contagion of the stigma.

Michelle Haynes

NYU’s Heilman extended her work on women’s perceptions of their capabilities in an ingeniously-designed study with Michelle Haynes of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

They asked participants to work remotely with another person on tasks traditionally associated with a male role: Acting as a managing supervisor at an investment company.
Volunteers were paired with male or female “partners,” but each volunteer actually acted alone without a teammate.

When female participants received positive group feedback, they “gave away” credit to men “teammates” unless their contribution was specific and indisputable.
However, women showcased their accomplishments when they worked with female “partners.”
Women systematically undervalue their contributions to group problem-solving when they collaborate on teams with men, but not when they work with other women.

This study demonstrated that women’s expectations and beliefs about their work contexts, themselves, their peers, and organizational superior influence how they construe group feedback on performance.
Women may continue to limit their advancement if they implicitly accept micro-inequities and limiting performance stereotypes.

Anita Wooley Williams

An unexpected positive finding about women’s role in work groups emerged from work by Carnegie Mellon University‘s Anita Williams Woolley, with Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, and MIT’s Alexander Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone, who demonstrated that the “collective intelligence” of collaborative group members exceeds the cognitive abilities of individual members.

Christopher Chabris

In fact, the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members did not significantly predict the performance of their groups overall.

Alexander Pentland

This means that a group’s performance is more dependent on interaction behaviors and norms than on individual cognitive capabilities in a result that parallels findings that self-management and interpersonal behaviors are more important to individual achievement than measured intelligence.

Nada Hashmi

Researchers assigned nearly 700 volunteers to groups ranging between two and five members to work on visual puzzles, negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments.
Collective intelligence of each group accounted for about 40 percent of the variation in performance on this wide range of tasks.

Thomas W. Malone

Collective intelligence is thought to depend on the group members’ “social sensitivity” to accurately perceiving each other’s emotions, and ability to share conversational turns more equally.
Groups with more women tended to excel in both capabilities, and the researchers suggest that these skills may be developed

-*How can workplace Inclusion and Diversity programs mitigate the impact of stigma-by-association?