Sex and IQ

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One of my minor fascinations is intelligence and IQ tests. While IQ tests have improved over the years, I believe it's impossible to design a test without some sort of bias, and I believe some of the tests can be misleading as they may occasionally give false positives or false negatives, so to speak, due to different processing strategies within a person's mind.

One thing that fascinates me is the differences between male and female brains....male and female NT brains anyway.

Males score anywhere from 3-5 IQ points higher than females on average. Males also have more variation in IQ scores than females, as more females cluster towards the center of the curve while more males clusters towards the tails of the curve. In other words, there are more males who suffer from mental retardation, and more males who are considered geniuses, and there are more females who have average IQ's.

3-5 points isn't really a lot. It's frequently irrelevant as we do not always base our decisions on logic. A person can have a very high IQ and not reap the benefits of it due to poor judgement or impulsiveness, depression, and other issues.

However, still I'm fascinated by this difference. While I don't believe that females are truly less "intelligent" than males, it cannot be denied that females are scarce in the fields of physical science, computer science, and engineering. It cannot be denied that females generally perform worse then males at trivia game shows such as Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

My conclusion is that the reason for this small variation in IQ scores to do with what we perceive intelligence to be. A person who is an excellent mathematician is more likely to be called a genius than a person who is an excellent author, or excellent therapist.

A person who memorizes facts from classical literature and political commentaries is more likely to be called intelligent than a person who memorizes facts from pop-culture magazines and social interactions.

I'm sure many of you here have come to realize the value of social intelligence in society, because most of us lack a sufficient degree of it.

Many of you also know that NT women are very socially complex and adept.

I propose that females score 3-5 points less on average on IQ tests because females are more geared towards social intelligence, and IQ tests are geared towards testing all but social intelligence.

I'm interested to hear the thoughts of others on this.

What's left to be said? You've pretty much summed up all the facts. Mine especially. Though I do feel that men are more logical and less patient at the same time. Which I guess could account for the 5 point difference.

yeah, i pretty much agree. the questions on IQ tests tend to be geared towards the workings of the male brain. it's a silly number, in my opinion. my IQ supposedly increased by about 20 points since i reached adulthood. kind of ridiculous for a test that is supposed to offer some kind of accurate measurement.

And here i thought the topic was going to be about how Sex is affected by IQ.

Well I'm not too sure about the average IQ difference, as others have said, you seem to beverages summed that up. What I can comment on is the inaccuracy of the tests, I took one as part of a job interview and in one section there were words unused in everyday life or standard education. I have a fair vocabulary but didn't know some and it made me think how that wasn't necessarily a fair test of intelligence, more of education. They never revealed my score, only that I passed it to get through to the next round.

It is true that there are more men than woman on the edges of the curve.

The fact that more men cluster to the left is due to disorders causing mental retardation that are sex linked on the X chromosome and arise due to the fact that males only have one X chromosome.


I believe the reason men also cluster to the right more than women is simply due to a bias in what we interpret intelligence to be.

Not all societies place so much emphasis on being able to figure out visual puzzles or math problems. A lot of small societies and cultures place more emphasis on social intelligence.

I believe this is one reason that African Americans score lower on average than European Americans on IQ tests. African American culture puts a stronger emphasis on social relationships and pop culture than white America does. Their average score is lower not because they are inherently less "intelligent", but because the tests have a bias against them in they do not ask the right questions which would reveal their true intellectual abilities.

Of course there are other factors as well, but none of them are inherent to race, and more circumstantial and environmental.

Ooooh I, I need your LSI!

If our IQs are partially influenced by environment, I wonder just how big of an effect toys have on the gender intelligence gap? Boys' toys and games seem to be more intellectually stimulating than girls' toys and games. Think about it:

Building a house out of Legos vs. playing with a pre-assembled doll house
Action figure play (explores strategy and physics) vs Barbie Doll play (explores social interaction)
Video games that involve problem-solving vs video games that involve playing dress up and taking care of cute animals

A typical type of IQ test question would ask the test taker how an object would look if it was rotated or flipped inside-out. Boys' toys and games offer more experience with that sort of thing.