Females boost collective intelligence more than men, study finds

Having more women in a team or group can boost the overall'collective intelligence' for decision making, when compared to a male dominated group, study reveals. Researchers from Pennsylvania's Carnegie Mellon University examined 22 studies covering 5,349 individuals engaged in group and individual activities. The team found that individual skill, group gender composition, and group collaboration were all predictors of collective intelligence, or the ability of a group to work together and solve a range of problems that vary in complexity. The research, that involved running machine learning algorithms over multiple large sets of data, revealed that the success of a group activity could be better predicted using collective intelligence measures than on individual member skill. These collective measures included social perceptiveness of individual members, group composition, particularly female proportion and age diversity, and group size.