Hmm I’ve been reading up on IQ and gender on Wikipedia. Pretty funny really. If you know a lot about IQ tests and life outcome, it’s laughably simple to see how some of the mooks of this world will read SAT scores and university IQ tests as proof that women have a lower IQ, as the male average on all of these is a bit higher than female. The reason for the higher score is…drumr0ll… That most of the really low IQ people won’t be taking those test, and they are mostly men!It’s very simple, the lower the IQ, the more likely you are to drop out of school and not get around to sitting an exam that you know you’ll fail abysmally. If your IQ is less than 70 there is a 55% chance that you’ll drop out of high school, at 80 to 70 it’s 35%, at IQs above 120 it’s statistically insignificant (just me then). And the majority people with learning difficulties are male (about twice the number of women). It skews the numbers to make male IQ look higher. If you want to test a population to find the mean, you have to test ALL OF THEM. Anyone who understands statistics even a bit can see the bias.
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In my country (NZ), there’s been a move away from IQ testing for quite some time now. For a few weeks over a couple of years there was a television programme called “Test the Nation”. What they found was compelling evidence that IQ tests are inherently flawed: men and women are better at different types of questions. For eg, men are better at rotating 3D objects, but women are better at linguistic puzzles. It’s to do with the different wiring of the brain, and partially due to “brain training”.
Most IQ tests are written by middle class white males *for* middle class white males. What are they testing? Ans: how intelligent a middle class white male one might be. 😦
I showed a Mensa question to several high achiever academic staff in my uni dept. None of them found the right answer. Reason: Mensa provided *one* correct answer, but aimed the question at people with a very narrow perception of what was actually being asked. Reality: there were about 30 *other* correct answers.
A fair point about the MENSA questions. I took a red pen to one of their test books one to point out the multiple correct answers to several of their ‘odd man out’.
“Most IQ tests are written by middle class white males *for* middle class white males”
But they dont score best on them. The IQ tests have shown to be a very good indicator of educational achievement and life prospects, so they do seem to test how much ‘smarts ‘you have. They always underpredict womens educational level slightly though, so they seem to have a slight male bias in a lot of tests.
I agree with what saffron said and with the results of that TV show and I would like to add that if a “global IQ test” would be it should have questions that all humans(with no mental diseases) could solve, for example – to recognize a pattern in a series of pictures is something that existes in every human mind and everyone can see a picture(unlike the written IQ tests which needs translation to be fit for a population with a differenc language than the source. In addition to that each language has a differenct structure and some languages may require a smarter brain but a language someone speaks is aquired from his enviroment and thus doesn’t reflect how smart he is).
Then there sould be a global average calculated from the average(for instance 35 question out of 50) of every human race.
A person that can’t recognizes less patterns than the average has a lower IQ.
and more than average right answers gives a higher IQ.
The flaw of this method is that it needs massive testing – an average of each human race should be made and then a global average.
The difference in intelligence between men and women lies in the fact that women are the more stable factor and men are not. Therefore genius is found more by males and less by females but the downturn is of course that idiots are also mostly male.
I know this is an old post, but I just had to chime in – the SAT and University bias is even more pronounced than you are indicating here because men are less likely than women in general to go to college.
Men are more likely to have learning differences that make getting into college harder regardless of IQ. Couple that with the fact that the college environment favors the studious over the impulsive and the male gender starts off with two strikes against it from the get go. This is shown, in part by the fact that women outperform men in school grades from middle school through university levels regardless of IQ.
All in all, this means that a man HAS to be significantly brighter than a woman before he even has a chance to get into college. This, of course, leads to the gender bias seen in SAT’s and University IQ tests.
However, tests at fourth grade level where this bias is eliminated show that, while both boys and girls average right at an IQ of 100, the bell curve of the male population is more spread out – so we tend to be smarter AND stupider than women at the same time.