REPORT: The conventional wisdom about sex differences in IQ is that males and females have the same average IQ. The conventional wisdom also stipulates that males are more variable than females, meaning that there are more mentally deficient and gifted males than females.
Presented here is information from two good papers on sex differences in IQ that disagree yet end up having the same conclusion with regard to the high extreme of IQs. Additionally, data from Mensa Canada is given that agrees with both those papers on that point.
Before continuing, it might be prudent to tackle one of the first objections that will be raised to a finding that the sexes are not equal in terms of IQ: that IQ tests are biased. Test bias is an intricate subject, and if you are interested in the details, the book Bias in Mental Testing by Arthur R. Jensen is suggested. (He started out believing that IQ tests were biased and through careful research ended up concluding that they generally were not).
Let it suffice to point out the analogy of height differences: Men are taller on average than women. If one does not like the situation, one cannot seriously accuse the height-measuring device of being biased. Many people have been influenced by anti-IQ reporting in the media, and politically correct writings by authors such as Stephen J. Gould to think that if IQ tests show an inequality it is obvious evidence that they are biased. There are ways of measuring test bias and merely showing that there is a difference between groups is not enough.
WISC-R
The paper that supports the conventional wisdom is Jensen, A. R., & Reynolds, C. R. (1983). It finds that females have a 101.41 mean IQ with a 13.55 standard deviation versus males that have a 103.08 mean IQ with a 14.54 standard deviation. You may want to read the IQ Basics page first if you are unfamiliar with IQ and standard deviations. By just looking at those figures, it seems to corroborate the conventional wisdom that has been known for decades: the average IQs are about the same and males are a bit more variable. However, if the summary data is used to generate a graph, a different picture emerges…
* …while the *average* IQs of White women and White men are the same, 100, the *ranges* are not.
The IQ Bell curve “tails” are fatter for men. In other words, most women’s scores cluster near 100, forming a very narrow and tall curve; but at the highest and lowest IQ levels, there are far more men, meaning the male curve is much broader and thicker. Ergo, there are more retarded White men than White women, but there are also more *geniuses* among White men than White women.
So, at professional levels, those few White women capable of landing those sorts of positions, (even with the Affirmative Action boost), ARE outnumbered and outclassed by smarter White men. Since professional women have to compete (and do so poorly) against all these smart(er) men, of COURSE they hate them. Donald Trump is the perfect symbol for these careerist, dried up, barren harpies, of all they envy and loathe.
(And *I’m* a smart White woman who is a fan of Trump!)
* Men outnumber women at the left and right ends of the IQ bell curve. Most of the brightest minds belong to men, as do most of the dullest.
Men are more logical than women. We’re more willing (and able) to break away from the herd, think outside the box and come up with new ideas. We’re more creative. Our curiosity about the world is deeper (and purer). Our need to understand how things work and why things are is stronger.
(Most men, like most women, are mindless followers. But the folks who are not mindless followers are mostly men. )
Girls are more obedient than boys. They’re more tolerant of boredom. They accept more readily the idea that something should be done because an authority figure wants it done. Thus, they grow up to become good worker drones – loyal, hard-working cogs.
(When I was in school, I was always struck by the fact that the girls in study groups focused all of their energy on memorizing passages from the textbook. They had no interest in synthesizing new information by analyzing its connections to what they already knew, or exploring its wider implications and deeper ramifications. They seemed to think that learning was nothing more than a cognitive binge-and-purge operation: stuff an umpteen number of factoids in your head and then spit them out on command. To me, that was boring beyond belief.)
But they tend to fall apart when they have to deal with situations where split-second decisions must be made based on constantly-changing information. Most women don’t have the capacity to form what the military calls total situational awareness, where you know not only where everything around you is right now, but where it’s been and where it might be going. Thus, they make bad leaders, especially in war.
(Keep in mind that I’m talking about generalities. When I say, “Men are taller than women,” don’t come back with, “I read an article about a 6’10″ fashion model from Germany! There are lots of women who are taller than men!” That kind of argument is so … girly.)
* Yeah, I think the differences in curiosity between men and women are more important than any differences in IQ at the extreme ends of the bell curve.
Many girls are curious about the world in their early adolescence, but they lose it as they mature. I saw this happen to my friends and sister (unbiased POV because I’m a woman too). A lot of women just become extremely focused on personal relationships and their own emotional lives. The more unstable their relationship situation, the less curiosity they have.
I’m an 8th grade teacher and I notice how students act too. When we did a unit on world religions the boys were totally enthralled and really enjoyed asking me further questions about the tenets of Buddhism, Judaism, etc. Only one of the girls (the most attractive one in the class, don’t know whether it was coincidental or not) was interested in the same way. The rest of the girls just wanted their grade and to complete the worksheets and project “correctly.” Girls are generally more well-behaved than the boys but get snippy/anxious if I am unwilling to lead them to the right answer.
* Men and women do not on average score the same on various subsections of IQ tests. Ergo whether they have the same “IQ” or not is going to be a matter of weighting. If you weight mathematical, spatial and analytical highly then men are clearly smarter. (And there are several IQ tests that show a consistent male advantage. They have more subtests that men do well on.) You could arguably get the same result for women, if you heavily weight plain vanilla verbal–reading comprehension. Pick what you value.
Secondly, most of the IQ testing and quasi-IQ testing that’s done comes from school kids. For instance the big-kahuna, the SAT is done on 16 or newbie 17 year olds. At that age, the females are young *women*. They are adult women–if you ones. They are sexually mature and have stopped growing. Many stopped growing and reached their adult height *years* previously. In contrast the males are … well … boys. Yes, they can make babies, but many of them have not even stopped growing. They are in no sense physically “mature” like the girls. Most of them won’t be equivalently mature to a 16 or 17 year old girl until they are in their first year or two of college–at least 18, more like 19 or 20. Both the girls and the boys will–excepting the terrible college PC crap–be “wising up” the next few years. But only the boys will still be actually physically growing, maturing their brain and actually getting smarter.
I confess I don’t have a link, but I’ve definitely read that some studies suggest the SAT slightly overpredicts female adult IQ relative to male IQ.
Thirdly, Whiskey’s writing was sloppy, but I don’t think he was trying to imply anything the huge white-black IQ gap for men and women, but rather a skills gap. This is certainly true.
It’s just a bone obvious fact that men continue to do pretty much all the material productive labor that *needs* doing. Women do quite a bit of clerical paper pushing, and routine service work–waitress, checkout clerk, maid–but otherwise matter chiefly in traditional female “helping professions”–teaching and nursing. If all the women in the country did not show up for work tomorrow we men would have to hustle to workaround some missing women service workers (slight backup at Starbucks this morning!), dive into some clerical work, and get some guys over the schools to monitor the kiddies. But the only critical hit I can see would be in the hospitals where, jump-into-the-breach guys would not have necessary nursing skills. We couldn’t immediately handle the patient load and would lose some folks (which is tolerable with sane triage … we don’t need to patch up that gangbanger or that old geezer). In contrast if *men* did not show up for work tomorrow … the world would end. We’d be living in the dark ages–literally–almost immediately. Civilization would end.
That’s the skills gap and why there is a “pay gap” that scum like Hillary yap on and on about endlessly without describing honestly.
