{"id":15960,"date":"2011-06-16T08:33:28","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T13:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=15960"},"modified":"2012-08-19T18:55:34","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T23:55:34","slug":"women-and-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2011\/06\/women-and-meetings\/","title":{"rendered":"Women and Meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once a year I attend a professional conference on juvenile law and practice. The keynote speaker at this year’s conference is Bruce D. Perry<\/a>, a scholar and psychologist who studies the effect of trauma on brain development and who runs a clinical practice treating children and juveniles who are forced to deal with those difficult issues.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The thrust of his main talk was that our modern approach to raising children is too isolating and that kids don’t get the intensive exposure to relationships they once did. [He embraces the EP model and asserts that we evolved to live in large social groups, not small nuclear families.] He stated that the average US kid gets now gets 8 hours of screen time per day. Wow. A pithy summary of his remarks might be that children need more people and less pixels in their life.<\/p>\n

Part of any effort to help troubled children (whether in a treatment, social work, school, or legal context) is going to involve group discussion and group decisions about services, treatment, and placement. These cases present tough issues and with few easy solutions — the collective wisdom of a group provides more ideas and a better recommendation about how to proceed than a single person could develop. Here is the interesting statement Dr. Perry made that my blog radar (always on) picked up for a post: The IQ of group decision-making goes up in direct proportion to the number of women participating in the group.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

That was an aside, with no additional detail or context. I suspect that in a roomful of men there is generally lots of talking and not much listening, and that adding women to the mix changes that unproductive dynamic in a positive way. I can think of two immediate applications of this interesting claim to LDS church governance:<\/p>\n

    \n
  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.<\/li>\n
  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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So what do you think of the claim? And do you think it is true in the LDS setting?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Once a year I attend a professional conference on juvenile law and practice. The keynote speaker at this year’s conference is Bruce D. Perry, a scholar and psychologist who studies the effect of trauma on brain development and who runs a clinical practice treating children and juveniles who are forced to deal with those difficult issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15960"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22070,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15960\/revisions\/22070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}