women, society and sobering statistics
Some rather interesting statistics have crossed my desk in the past few weeks. The first study was an Australian Communities Report by Olive Tree Media. It noted that the perceived role of women in the church was a “belief blocker” for 60% of Australians. This composite figure included the respondents who named the perceived roles of women a “belief block”, completely (20%), significantly (14%) and slightly (26%). The second study that came to my attention was completed by psychologists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon in the US . They divided people into teams and asked them to complete intelligence tasks together. Interestingly, the IQ scores of the group members barely affected collective performance. The number of women on a team, however, affected it a lot – the more women, the better. It seems that the capacity of women to raise the “collective intelligence” of a group is related to the fact their “social sensitivity” is usually stronger than that of men. Thus they tend to draw out ...