Men and Meetings

Warning: this is a long post, and it actually kind of devolves into a rant, for a while. If you’re a first-time reader, don’t worry; I’m usually not this bad. ;-)



So I saw an interesting post, this morning, on a Latter-day Saint blog called Times and Seasons. The post, entitled Women and Meetings, cited a recent professional conference the author attended, in which speaker Dr. Bruce D. Perry stated that “The IQ of group decision-making goes up in direct proportion to the number of women participating in the group.” The blogger’s question, therefore, was what the reader thinks of this claim, and specifically its implications for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
  1. Recent changes making the Ward Council (with three women) rather than the PEC (with zero women) the primary group decision-making body at the LDS congregational level improves the quality of decisions made at the local level.
  2. The absence of women in the senior councils of the LDS Church at the institutional level adversely affects the decisions coming out of those senior councils.
Personally, I think it would be extremely easy to oversimplify or overcomplicate this claim, and those who know me already realize I’m going to err on the side of the latter. So let’s break it down:

First of all, I’m not sure how literally we should take the term “IQ,” but IQ is a horrible measure of intelligence—and that’s coming from someone whose IQ was once measured in the 190s. Take, for example, two individuals with the exact same level of intelligence. One has a doctorate; the other is working on his GED. Due to the former student’s greater opportunities for learning, his IQ will be significantly lower than the latter’s. There’s a reason that SAT inventor Carl Brigham felt that both IQ and SAT scores could not accurately determine true intelligence and spent the last 20 years of his life successfully campaigning against their usage on a national level. (The Educational Testing Service was literally created over his dead body, less than five years after his death in 1943.)

Now, that having been said, I suspect that Dr. Perry was not actually referring to IQ per se, but rather intelligence. If this be the case, then the preceding paragraph is completely irrelevant. What is interesting, however, is how odd the statement seems. Let’s question it, for a moment:
  • If we have a group of 10 women trying to make a decision, does the IQ go up if we add an eleventh woman? A twelfth? A thirteenth?
  • If we have a group of 10 women trying to make a decision, does the IQ go up if we add a single man? What about two men? Three?
  • If we have a group of 10 intelligent women trying to make a decision, does the IQ go up if we add a stupid woman?
  • What if we add a stupid woman to a group of 10 intelligent men?
  • What if we add a European man to group of five American women and five American men?
I don’t deny for a moment that having differing viewpoints represented will enhance most examples of groupthink, so I suspect that swapping out the Priesthood Executive Committee for the Ward Council will likely have significant benefit. But what if the roles were reversed? If the original council were made up of Relief Society members, would the addition of a handful of Priesthood holders have the same effect? It’s the lack of qualification that seems suspect to me.

So now we turn to the second part of the question: if we assume that “the senior councils of the Church” means the various presiding Priesthood quorums, does the absence of women in said councils adversely affect the decisions? The answer, I’m certain, is yes. However, would the presence of women in said councils also adversely affect the decisions? I suspect the answer to that would be yes, as well. The presence or absence of any individual or group will indubitably come with both pros and cons. Thus, whether said presence or absence has an overwhelmingly positive or negative effect is necessarily a product of the matrix whereby it be measured.

To be continued in Part II :-)

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