New study: Software teams with more women communicate better
getclockwise.com
getclockwise.com
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For the study, the authors looked at four types of community smells:
1. Organizational Silos. Groups in the community don’t communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members.
2. Black Clouds. Community members are overloaded with information because communication isn’t structured well.
3. Lone Wolves. Defiant, disrespectful contributors won’t listen to others.
4. Bottlenecks. One team member wants to be the only way information moves between sub-communities.
Previous studies have shown that women are fundamental to reducing community smells and avoiding accumulating social debt for teams in other industries. But these studies show that women increase team efficiency and organizational quality on software engineering teams specifically. Teams with no women have 7 mean community smells compared to 3 for teams with at least one woman. These results are statistically significant (p-value < 0.05) and have a large effect size (d=0.68).
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> we found [...] a strictly connection between gender diversity and communication patterns
Obviously this doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the research but it is jarring to the reader and makes one question what else about the paper has not been checked over before publication
Generally I wouldn't consider the occasional typo to be indicative of the quality of the underlying research. Zooming in on a minor detail in an attempt to paint the paper negatively seems needlessly pedantic, but that's just my opinion.
Pro tip - you can almost always find a paper on google from one of the authors' personal sites. Or sci-hub. Or worst case, just email them.
Absolutely true in my experience. A high-performing team of majority women coached me to have our teams write "ground rules" for team communication. The improvement was a big leap forward. Many example ground rules are in my git repo:
This is absolutely true. Fundamentally, a great engineer is doing a TON of communicating -- writing technical designs, whiteboarding different approaches, explaining reasoning in code reviews, breaking down tasks for more junior engineers, coaching and mentoring others, interviewing... and about a million other things. The role of communication only increases as the problem complexity and scope increases.
The same goes for other minorities who are treated like lesser people who need handouts.
This is the softest of sciences, minimally quantitative, non-experimentally verifiable and therefore subject to massive institutional bias - the same way that proponents of forced equity believe that the institutions they are fighting with have developed their own biases.
Equality of opportunity does not imply equality of outcome. But it doesn't matter - this post will likely be flagged because our own institution is increasingly biased toward certain unacceptable viewpoints - to the degree that we forbid discussion on nearly every popular forum. But you're only emboldening and recruiting extremists when you silence an entire alternative point of view.
Edit: Let me explain further, and justify my use of the word "dangerous." Let's forget for a moment the specific topic at hand. Imagine a field of study which is strongly influencing corporate and, local, state, and federal policy, which is simultaneously immune from criticism because of cultural norms.
That is where all of these pro-diversity and pro-inclusion studies are coming from. I'm not necessarily suggesting that they're wrong - only that systematically, institutionally, this is poor science and possibly leading society down a suboptimal path.
One side of the diversity and inclusion discussion is forbidden. We are forced, top down, to take it as a given that this is how things should be done. I cannot support alternative viewpoints with sources because researchers who would publish anything against the grain would be, in modern parlance, cancelled.
[1] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWGenderSmells-preprint...
>1. Organizational Silo. Siloed groups in the community that do not communicate with each other, except through one or two of their respective members;
If I'm working on team A I don't need to know what literally every person on every other team is doing.
>2. Black Cloud. There is an excessive information overload due to the lack of structured communication. This might lead to a huge increase of data exchanges across a community;
What? Lack of communication leads to excessive information? That doesn't even make sense.
>3. Lone Wolf. Unsanctioned or defiant contributors who work in an irrespective manner or regardless of their team;
Where I'm from we call this initiative. I've been rewarded for showing it my entire life. This is not black and white.
>4. Radio Silence. One team member interposes themselves into every formal communication across two or more sub-communities with little or no flexibility to introduce other parallel channels.
I don't even understand what this means.
None of the first three points are black and white, as they make them out to be. This is pure ideologically driven data mining playing off the stereotype of women being better communicators. Ironic.
I think it is you and not the article who is showing immense bias.
In general it doesn't seem far-fetched to me that women might be better communicators than men in general, but I don't have any hard evidence for or against this.
It's a "divide and conquer" social engineering strategy to get regular people fighting each other based on in-borne traits (via tribalist psychological manipulation -- pervasive in our entertainment & political media currently) rather than teaming up to fight corporate control of politics, media, & the military industrial complex.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
On the other, women and MTF trans are the same because it’s all about how you feel and any differences are because of the patriarchy.
Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.
Hopefully such junk science stops being published. If there is a way of communicating that’s better for both guys and girls, and some of both are capable of doing it, then it can be taught to both with most learning it.
Unless you’re going to claim most guys are simply incapable of reading social queues, or female social queues (excluding sexual attraction, where intent is often hidden).
Women are more people-oriented while men are more thing-oriented, on average (1, 2).
I don't think this is grounds for "All men should communicate like women" or
"Women's style of communication is more productive in [name some male-oriented group]", or "We should prioritize women's communication style in [highly technical groups which rarely include women due to biologically factual statistical differences in occupational orientation ^]", which is a dubious proposition.
(^ = differences between women and women in interest levels and at the tails of achievement in "thing"/"systems" oriented technology occupations -- see citations 1 & 2)
Notice the pattern.
Look at how much usage of words related to "patriarchy", "misogyny", "institutional racism", "diversity and inclusion", "social justice" have increased in NYT and other mainstream media sources from 2010-2020 (3, 4).
We see this again and again in media. Here is some hard data on this mentality and its pervasion of politics, media, entertainment, -- an obvious social engineering effort to anyone paying attention over the last 10-15 years.
Interestingly enough OP's particular study would not be here on HN if it had any other result.
I highly doubt a sample size of 34 for something as ridiculous sounding as "community smell" is going to be in anyway groundbreaking, at least when compared to actual substantial research on the topic of male vs female occupational interests.
The 2nd study here has 500,000 participants, for example. Not 34.
Bottom line: Identity politics is a worthless, and came into vogue in order to dissolve the Occupy Wallstreet movement which sprang up in the aftermath of the 2008-early 2010's Recession. (5).
[1] Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/
[2] Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests -- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/38061313_Men_and_Th...
[3] The NYTimes is Woke "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis." https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
[4] Zach Goldberg on twitter "1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy fucking shit'" https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888
[5] Discussion on how identity politics conveniently sprang up as a counter-movement to deliberately disrupt up the Occupy Wallstreet movement, which is corroborated by the timelines of sources 3 and 4 above. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1wecyn/identity...
It shows data for SJW-related buzz words-- word frequency over time.
In which case, if men and women do not on average perform equally at given tasks, there's no reason to expect gender parity or even pay parity in meritocratic systems.
That's an unspoken contradiction inmplied by many of these studies. But I haven't seen any researcher mention it recently, for increasingly obvious reasons.
But regardless, even if there’s a difference, we have to consider nature vs. nurture. I think men could be brought up to be more communicative, but that’s just me.
Furthermore, it’s absurd to say the pay gap somehow reflects different skillsets. We’re talking about unequal pay for the same work. Of course women should be paid the same as men doing the same work as they are.
This utopian Western notion of the mind being a perfect clean slate from birth has no basis. Do you really think that the mountains of evidence, in the form of gender discrepancies which have been almost universal across time and culture, can be so trivially handwaved away as "social constructs"?
What about different behaviors in other sexually dimorphic mammals? You know, like, literally all of them?
Of course there are differences which go beyond nurture.
This idea that one group "seems" to be better than another seems rather vague and unsubstantiated, as does the basis for being paid more.
Being paid is a consequence of skills, value, productivity, sales & marketing, profitability efficiency, alongside supply and demand. If you're not marketing your skills (or don't have skills to market), that's no one's fault but yours-- no one owes you anything, regardless of 'communication abilities'.
The original pay gap came from a trash paper which compared average pay of women and men across disciplines. So you had doctors and engineers grouped with nurses and daycare workers. That was the origin of ".75¢ on the dollar". Within most industries there is no paygap that cannot be explained by lack of negotiation and shorter work hours, among other factors. We also take it as a given that average performance of men and women on any task is identical, and that's nonsense.
The paygap myth is pure propaganda.
Edit: imagine my surprise when even CBS is admitting as much!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-pay-gap-is-a-complet...
Nooo, this isn't politically biased at all ;)
They didn't SEEK this outcome of their study to conform with currently in-vogue political trends, not at all-- it's in no way biased ;)
No, no, you see-- We must get men to think, act and communicate like women! And women to think, act and communicate like men.
Yes, that's the answer-- Confuse people into thinking they're the same while demonizing men and elevating women with fake, clearly ideologically biased, nonsensical studies which use terms like "community smell".
Neomarxists/diversity-outraged: Women and men are equal.
Neomarxists/diversity-outraged: Women are better than men. We need more women in positions of power! (Search: "Entryism")
Noo... this couldn't be biased by current fad politics... not at all ;)
/sarcasm
In case anyone is wondering why Woke/SJW/identity-politics neomarxist messaging suddenly increased in the media in the 2010-2020 timeframe--
Here's an interesting summary of how usage of woke & SJW terminology dramatically increased in NYT publications since 2010 (alongside its increase in other forms of media).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
The use of "Woke" & SJW terminology rapidly increased following the dissolution of Occupy Wallstreet movement in 2010.
Hint: It's almost as if media/politics/entertainment elites are encouraging the middle class to fight each other, rather than the top 0.001% ;)