Too Many Alpha Males Posted on December 4, 2007 Jay Belsky (bio) talks about the advantages of having both men and women on a large research team.

The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development is really a radical democracy in the most fundamental sense.

When push came to shove, we would have to take votes at times. This may sound politically incorrect, and I say this jokingly, but honestly at the same time, when we got started that steering committee was composed of one male PI, me, one male statistician, and the other nine, 10, 11 people were females. While we added males along the way, the ratio was always overwhelmingly female.

To be honest I don’t think, with the kind of differing intellectual perspectives people brought to the task and even their history of intellectual disagreement, we could’ve succeeded if the ratio had been reversed. There just probably would’ve been too much alpha male behavior, that in the final analysis the women brought something about being able to relate and coordinate that was facilitative.

At the same time many of them shied away from the explicit conflict and disagreement which I think we needed and didn’t have at times. So I think it’s hard for me to imagine that you can bring together groups that were overwhelmingly male and have fundamentally underlying difference of points of view on a problem and expect to kind of have a long term effective collaboration, just because I think it’s harder for men to do.

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