Yahoo Finance Women run meetings better than men, study claims
A global study claims women tend to be better at running meetings effectively than men.
Two researchers at the US university MIT carried out a survey of almost 20,000 readers of the Harvard Business Review across six continents to ask them about their productivity habits.
Robert Pozen and Kevin Downey said it showed “minimal” differences between male and female productivity, but suggested men and women often tended to be productive in different ways.
They wrote in the Harvard Business Review: “Women tended to score particularly high when it came to running effective meetings—women were more likely than men to send out an agenda in advance, keep meetings to less than 90 minutes, and finish meetings with an agreement on next steps.”
They said women surveyed were also more likely to say they prepared their diaries the night before, and to respond to important emails.
READ MORE: How emotional labour affects women at work
But the researchers said men “did particularly well” coping with high volumes of messages, avoiding looking at their emails too often and skipping unimportant messages.
They said men surveyed also reported getting more quickly to the final product.
Another notable finding was on age — “the productivity scores of respondents rose systematically the older they got.”
The authors said older workers appeared better at setting and sticking to routines for low-value tasks, running meetings, delegating work and managing high volumes of messages.
Productivity also correlated with seniority, with the authors open-minded about whether more productive people were promoted or more senior people were forced to become more productive.
READ MORE: How to stop procrastinating instead of working
