Female creativity tops with usefulness

Men have got risk taking, women empathy as their source for new ideas

 

 

 

 

Mixed teams are a good idea due to a lot of reasons. A current US-Chinese meta-analysis demonstrates that this is particularly key for processes of creativity, though. Why? 1. Men and women complement each other perfectly: Men are creative based on their tendency to take more risks, women do so since they can better put themselves on somebody´s place. 2. Therefore female creativity comes across as more useful. They are focusing more on workability and not only on the passion per se to develop new ideas. 3. “Usefulness” or “Workability” should according to the researchers be much more often taken as the criteria for judging and selecting inputs of creativity. By doping so automatically much more women will be invited for brainstorming sessions of any kind.

Kim/Vaulont/Zhang/Byron, “ Looking Inside the Black Box of Gender Differences in Creativity: A Dual-Process Model and Meta-Analysis”, in: Journal of Applied Psychology, 2024, 109(12), 1861-1900.

From the practise:

In challenging times as today the funniest innovative ideas are not necessarily applicable shortly. That given women could be motivated to knock louder at the doors of boards that are desperately looking for solutions due to these new scientific insights. And that´s terrific.

Independently I´d like to add on based on my multiple experiences as a moderator in workshops designed for the development of new ideas: you always need criteria for coping efficiently and properly with the bunches of creativity you are expecting.

Without any criteria you are inadvertently triggering ideas that you surely did not want to proceed – and thus disappointing from the very beginning those who have trusted on you and your alleged 100% open space creativity. Believe me: this is not a limitation of creativity since there is still an abundance of ideas possible. You are just focussing better and are still getting a lot.