And you are here why?

/via https://xkcd.com/385/ It turns out that just thinking about stereotypes can impair your performance —  especially if it’s a stereotype about you .  The emphasis here is critical to understanding how and why so much bulls**t has spread around “ women suck at programming ”, “ men are logical, women are emotional ” and so forth. Roll the tape back to 1995 when  a  huge  NIH study  (•) showed that there were sex-based differences in spatial abilities, with men outperforming women by over one standard-deviation. The result was a plethora of follow-up studies trying to figure out whether this was due to  testosterone ,  brain wiring , and whatnot. Well, guess what —  it turned out that this was all based on flawed research . A  subtle  flaw, mind you, based on expectations, but a flaw nevertheless. In 2008 (why did it take so long?) folks at the University of Berlin did  a follow-on study  (••) where they “primed” the subj...

Yeah, we’ve all seen the phrase “People Leave Managers, Not Companies”, right? It might have been in   an article , or   a book , but the baseline story is always —  so logically  — some variation of If you are a good manager, then people like working for you, and will stay around, but if you are a bad manager, then people do not like working for you, and will, therefore, leave It’s all so straightforward and logical, right? Well, it turns out that it is also a load of bullshit. Raghuram et al.   (•)studied this exact issue, and discovered that,   employees leave both good and bad bosses at almost the same rates . The reasoning, as it turns out is also just as logical — and as with most things in the real world, not as “simple” a story as we would like it to be. Basically, good managers   level-up   their employees to the point where they are now ripe for the picking by others. Good leadership doesn’t reduce employee turnover precisely   beca...