This came up on LW before (<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/73w/study_on_group_intelligence/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/73w/study_on_group_intelligence/</a>); I pointed them (<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/73w/link_study_on_group_intelligence/4neu" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/73w/link_study_on_group_intelligence...</a>) to a previous comment I had seen dissecting the study: <a href="http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/3#comment-238026281" rel="nofollow">http://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-tea...</a><p>tl;dr: as one would expect, it's not that great and certainly doesn't justify the title.
The study was done in only one perspective, wich is adding women to a group of men. In other words, men perform better in the presence of women. Next should be trying to add women to more women, or maybe adding men to a group of women, in order to have a bigger picture about how the collective intelligence works when mixing genders.
These studies always leave out the negative side of social sensitivity: bullying and exclusion. In a task worked on for 5 hours everyone still has on their party manners.
This dovetails to some degree with recent studies showing female asset managers both are less risk-tolerant and provide better overall returns than male asset managers, on average.
Recipe for success = just add women.<p>Mad Men for the win. I knew replacing our secretaries with computers would destroy America. Your team doesn't need more developers, you need a Peggy Olson.
Did they try to control for Tea Party members or Christian fundamentalists? I'm not saying this just for snark value; if you don't believe in science or the scientific method, for instance, it would seem a bit hard for you to contribute much in the way of intelligence on such questions. Same thing with "social sensitivity"; I would guess that's not a strength among isolationists or fundamentalists of various types.