Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked about his thoughts on the cosmos. In a slow, gloomy voice, he intoned, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity, it’s trying to kill us. And so is Earth. From sinkholes to tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis.” Tyson humorously described a very real problem: the universe is a vast obstacle course of catastrophic dangers. Asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, and global pandemics represent existential risks that could annihilate our species or irreversibly catapult us back into the Stone Age.

But nature is the least of our worries. Today’s greatest existential risks stem from advanced technologies like nuclear weapons, biotechnology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and even artificial superintelligence. These tools could trigger a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Exacerbating this situation are “threat multipliers” — issues like climate change and biodiveristy loss, which, while devastating in their own right, can also lead to an escalation of terrorism, pandemics, famines, and potentially even the use of WTDs (weapons of total destruction)...

The good news is that none of these existential threats are inevitable. Humanity can overcome every single known danger. But accomplishing this will require the smartest groups working together for the common good of human survival.  So, how do we ensure that we have the smartest groups working to solve the problem? Get women involved.

A 2010 study link, published in Science, made two unexpected discoveries. First, it established that groups can exhibit a collective intelligence (or c factor). Most of us are familiar with general human intelligence, which describes a person’s intelligence level across a broad spectrum of cognitive tasks. It turns out groups also have a similar “collective” intelligence that determines how successfully they can navigate these cognitive tasks. This is an important finding because “research, management, and many other kinds of tasks are increasingly accomplished by groups — working both face-to-face and virtually.” To optimize group performance, we need to understand what makes a group more intelligent.

Instead, the study found three factors linked to group intelligence. The first pertains to the “social sensitivity” of group members, measured by the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes test link. This term refers to one’s ability to infer the emotional states of others by picking up on certain non-verbal clues link. The second concerns the number of speaking turns taken by members of the group. “In other words,” the authors write, “groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn-taking.”

The last factor relates to the number of female members: the more women in the group, the higher the group’s IQ. As the authors of the study explained, “c was positively and significantly correlated with the proportion of females in the group.” If you find this surprising, you’re not alone: the authors themselves didn’t anticipate it, nor were they looking for a gender effect.

Why do women make groups smarter? The authors suggest that it’s because women are, generally speaking, more socially sensitive than men, and the link between social sensitivity and collective intelligence is statistically significant...

... Given the unique, technogenic dangers that haunt the twenty-first century, we need the smartest groups possible to tackle the problems posed by existential risks. We need groups comprised of women...

As Sir Martin Rees writes in Our Final Hour, “what happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.” Future generations may very well thank us for taking the link between collective intelligence and female participation seriously.

Phil Torres, Future of Life Institute