When Majority Men Respect Minority Women, Groups Communicate Better: A Neurological Exploration

Groups must leverage their members’ diverse knowledge to make optimal decisions. However, the gender composition of a group may affect this ability, particularly because solo status female members (one female grouped with males) are generally allocated lower status than their male counterparts, so their knowledge is more likely to be ignored. Whereas most previous work suggests ways solo status women can increase their status; instead, we propose that groups communicate better when men give their female teammate appropriate respect. We examine this in mixed-gender groups working on a hidden profile task while wearing wireless EEGs to measure live neural activity. We find that groups who solve the problem correctly are more likely to contain majority male members with more approach-oriented mindsets, operationalized as neural alpha asymmetry, as they respect their female teammate more. Thus, we provide evidence that neural activity is partially responsible for whether mixed-gender groups make optimal decisions.