Finding the answer to this last question is not easy, of course. Either a "yes" or "no" answer would be quite controversial, given that it would reveal an industry gender bias. Perhaps it would be better not even to ask. And yet I asked. I did it by conducting a small investigation. I asked the question, “Why do you want a woman on your software team?” and I got twenty-nine brave respondents to answer, out of which six were women. I also perused many studies that asked similar questions about women engineers and managers.
While my sample is too small to qualify as a rigorous study, the answers seem to fall into patterns that reflect common perceptions about women in software. When reading the rest of my analysis, please take everything with a grain of salt. A quick non-anonymous survey cannot answer with certainty this complex question.
The results fall into eight main categories. For each category, I have listed several quotes from my sample. Sometimes I compared my survey's responses to data from other studies to assess how accurate these perceptions were.
#1. Women are team catalysts
“They are less likely to be directly confrontational (unless you really annoy them), and more likely to channel their competitiveness into making the whole team better.”
“[A woman] is more about nurturing and less about competition. [A woman] is more about teamwork.”
The data:
• The research confirms that this perception may be true. In Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women, Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone document the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the group's individual members and that the tendency to cooperate effectively increases with the number of women in a group.
• However, collaborative behavior can at times hurt women, by causing them to appear indecisive or too deferential, as recently argued in Collaboration’s Hidden Tax on Women’s Careers.
#2. Women have alternative points of view and exhibit deeper customer empathy
“Diversity of opinion matters when doing a challenging design.”
“They certainly seem to have a different way of thinking and looking at problems that's extremely valuable.”
“If the company's product is targeted at consumers, not having women on the team can significantly hamper growth in the female demographic.”
The data:
• The research reveals that indeed diversity can be very beneficial. A Washington Post blog on diversity refers to six different studies across many domains, including the performance of Standard and Poor’s top 1,500 firms, the accuracy of Wall Street traders, and the quality of scientific academic research.
• However, diversity is more important to women and minorities than it is to white men. A Glassdor.com survey found that 72 percent of women consider workforce diversity important versus 62 percent of men. To add to the controversy, Penelope Trunk, a woman entrepreneur, is quoted in an article on how to combat the all-male startups, "You can't go to work every day and have arguments. When the best answer is the fastest answer, you don't want a diverse team."
#3. Gender should not matter at all when hiring
“Someone’s gender should not affect you hiring them, or even warrant you considering them differently. That is called discrimination.”
“There's no difference between them as far as gender goes. Some of the men brought their personal issues (alcoholism, marriage problems) into the office and took it out on the staff. [Some] women managers had psychological problems (poor self-esteem, hoarding, need to control/micromanage) and drove staff crazy.”
The related data:
• Forced diversity can hurt firm performance. A study by Dittmar and Ahern analyzed the impact of a 2003 Norwegian law requiring all public-limited firms to have at least 40 percent representation of women on their boards of directors. They found that when a firm experienced at least a 10 percent increase in women on its board, Tobin's Q dropped 18 percent (Tobin's Q ratio is a measure of firm assets in relation to a firm's market value). Reason: the imposed quota forced companies to choose directors they would not have chosen otherwise.
• The interview style matters. Changing job interviews to be less about individual skill and more about collaboration increases the odds of hiring women.
#4. Women work harder than men
“They have worked harder to get where they are and are better on average than men in the same roles.”
“I work with numerous engineering women. They're some of the most driven people I've ever met.”
The data seem to show that women work at least as hard as men.
• One study shows that women in authority position receive more negative reactions, even when they say the exact same verbatim scripts. This bias affects their hiring or career decisions, and they often need to work harder to prove themselves.
• Not a big percentage of women in technology dare to work part-time because doing so puts their careers at risk, for three main reasons invoked by employers: 1. If the company needs to cover the work with multiple part-time people, the efficiency of a team goes down as the team size grows. 2. To work on critical systems requires employees to be immediately reachable. 3. The less time one spends outside of work, the more time one spends thinking about how to solve difficult problems at work.
#5. Women improve the workplace culture
“In my experience and others, when working at more homogenous, ‘brogrammer’ type environments, the teams tended to skew to certain conversations and culture, which made some folks (even male) very uncomfortable.”
“The presence of women on a software team is often an indication of a team characterized by tolerance, sense of humor, and overall good team dynamics.”
#6. Women make better managers and leaders
“Gentle when giving feedback, and caring of my concerns.”
“God bless a woman’s communication ability. They know how to encourage and inspire employees. They even could observe 43 muscles in your face to understand and feel your changes.”
The data show that, as bosses, women are equal to or better than men.
• A study finds that women are better managers than men, based on the fact that that the employees who work for a female boss are, on average, 6% more engaged than those who work for a male manager. (Female employees who work for a female manager are the most engaged of any group of workers.)
• However, not everyone agrees: the data from surveys show that fewer employees prefer female bosses to male bosses (although most have no gender preference). Women can be penalized for being “too aggressive,” even when their behavior is identical to men’s. Even among women, a larger percentage prefer having a male boss over a female one, due to so-called “queen-bee” competitiveness between women, or because some female bosses appear to lack empathy for their female employees who struggle more than they did. The good news is that the trend is positive, with the gap closing.
#7 Women are more detailed-oriented than men
“In my experience, women are far more adept at drilling down on requirements, both high-level and detailed, to understand the whole picture before diving in and starting implementation.”
“Women are much better at contemplating the big picture, taking care of all details with scrupulosity.”
I didn’t find any relevant data here, but I suspect that women and men are comparable. Personally, I’m in awe of my husband who organizes the plates in the dishwasher as if aligning them with a precision micrometer instrument. I still don’t know how he does it.
#8 Women are better multitaskers than men
“It may be a gross over-generalization, but they seem to be much more organized and detail-oriented than the fellas.”
The data are inconclusive:
• Some studies show that women are better at multitasking because they tend to prioritize better, organize their time, and keep calm under pressure.
• However, studies show that men tend to think they are better at multitasking than they are in reality, and women tend to believe they're worse than they are. Researchers admit that it is possible that for certain tasks (e.g., those that test spatial ability) men might be better at multitasking.
Maybe not everybody thinks it is important to have women on their teams, but many do. That is encouraging to me, and for my fellow women in software. I’m relieved that it seems there is no need for us to “act more like a man.” Being a woman is perfectly fine. It may even be a plus.
On a more personal note, I found it fascinating how each quality seems to have its corresponding pitfalls. I am a highly collaborative person, which I thought was one of my greatest assets. However, studies show that I should switch at times to being more assertive, or else I could be perceived as slow to make decisions.
I’m optimistic. The world is changing, and the biases will disappear one day. My company and many other great employers lead the way in championing the diversity that women bring to teams. You can lead this battle, too. If anyone is telling you that it’s okay to have no woman in their software team, please respond that they don’t know what they're losing. And that goes for any team, not only in software.
