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Are men smarter than women? (merged)

fairnymph

fairnymph

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Are men smarter than women?

*topic inspired by a conversation with zorn*
I realize that there are different types of "intelligence" and that in general it is hard to evaluate intelligence. But, in spite of this, I think it can safely be said that we all judge others' intelligence, whether consciously or not.
Although I consider myself more intelligent than many people, I have to admit that I think the number of men smarter than me is significantly higher than the number of women smarter than me. I have also observed that most of my friends consider their father to be the more intelligent parent. This leads me to believe that men are, overall, smarter than women -- ie, the average man is smarter than the average woman.
Is this difference (if there is a difference) in intelligence genetic or socially induced?
If my hypothesis is true, what implications does it have for heterosexual relationships and male-female friendships? Obviously we love people for more than just their minds, but intellect DOES play a role in relationships, and in compatability.
As for the gay folks --if you think this is true, do you think homosexual relationships are better because the couple is less likely to have an intellectual discrepancy?
Note: By intelligence, I am NOT referring to emotional maturity/compassion/perceptiveness. That is a different non-intellectual kind of virtue. And one that I would say that women have more than men -- again, this could be genetic or socially induced.
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: fairnymph ]
 
According to someone in the know, men's IQ curves are broader than that of women. Translation? There are more intelligent men than intelligent women, but there are also more low-intelligence men than low-intelligence women. Women's IQ curve is steeper and more centralized.
 
What min said. My pet theory is that men are prone to more mutations because of the XY chromosomes compared to the genetic stability of the XX arrangment, therefore men are prone to more extremes in a whole bunch of categories including intelligence.
I think another factor is that women are physically more likely to give birth to boys in a certain age range. This maternal age range coincides with the "optimal" age range that produces the smartest babies (through such factors as health of mother, emotional maturity of mother for child rearing, etc.). Therefore, you get that odd symbiotic relationship between genetic and social factors.
If my personal opinion matters, I have noticed that there are many more men than women at the highest levels of intelligence. I define "highest levels of intelligence" as being three standard deviations or higher above the norm, or approximately higher than the 99.9th percentile. I have spent a great deal of time looking for intelligent women, so if someone knows where there exists an abundance of contradictory evidence, please let me know....it would make me a happy man! ;)
I don't want to redirect fairnymph's thread, but I also want to point out I have observed that at the highest levels of intelligence, boys tend to be somewhat effeminate and girls tend to be somewhat masculine. I am a masculine straight guy who doesn't go around acting "macho," and personally I like the fact that intelligent women tend not to be the super-feminine type. I do like the balance provided by the combination of myself and a girl who avoids uber feminine stereotypes.
Good thread!
 
While it does sometimes seem as if the majority of cutting-edge mathematicians and physicists are male, most of the guys that sit around and claim men are smarter than women are complete dumbasses.
In elementary school, the smartest kid was always the quiet, small, well-dressed girl who also had perfect handwriting and never got into trouble. Now in university, the smartest kid always seems to be the computer-engineering guy who, when he finally comes out of his room, has untied shoes and is wearing a jedi robe. I wonder why it changes like that.
One theory I have as to why more women tend to be better at something, but a few men always dominate the elite ranks- is that men are more biologically able to focus on something. Women on the whole seem to be more talented at things like sports, or playing instruments, or research. But when it actually comes to devoting your whole life to being a master of something, it seems that men are more able to make the commitment. Women seem to value being well-rounded more while other things like family-rearing cut into the time it takes to master a skill.
 
When I was seven years old, I got off on figuring out the probability that Reggie Jackson would get at least 2 hits in that day's baseball game, given that he would probably get 4 to 5 at-bats and had a .285 batting average.
When my sister was seven, she would spend hours with my mother talking about why people acted the way they do.
Today, I'm better than my sister is at math and logic; my sister is a fantastic social worker.
A lot of the black kids in my neighborhood who spent their days on the playground ended up becoming very good at basketball.
I wonder what Jimmy the Greek would have to say about this.
 
at the highest levels of intelligence, boys tend to be somewhat effeminate and girls tend to be somewhat masculine
Yes, off-topic, but also very very true. I have a lot of masculine qualities (forward/direct/blunt, assertive, domineering, bossy, argumentative, etc) but fortunately I like to wear skirts etc. and I do consider myself very feminine. However, that's mostly my appearance - my personality is almost completely masculine.
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: fairnymph ]
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Like fairnymph, I generally judge of the intelligence of people I've known for very long. Experience suggests to me that you it is close to a single quantity... people's ability to remember things, understand new concepts, analyze arguments, etc, seem to correlate pretty well.
Anyways, I went to college at a very selective tech school: we were like 75% men, 25% women. I have to say that I definitely noticed that the men were on average significantly smarter than the women. There were a number of amazing brilliant guys there; but I never knew any truly brilliant girls, and only one "very, very smart" girl. The average seemed clearly much lower for women than guys. I had no preconceptions coming in... this is just something I noticed and found odd.
This could agree with min's idea of male IQs being broader, as the school naturally sampled the high end of the curve.
Catch-22--
Hmmm, the guys/girls at my school didn't fit traditional gender roles... but I think that can all be attributed to us all being tech nerds. :) The guys aren't effeminate, just nerdy. The girls often seemed masculine, but that was probably due to 1) hanging out with mostly guys while younger, and 2) not having learned to care about their appearance / do popular girlish things.
cooldiscoed--
My guess would be this: elementary school and high school aren't really that tough, in the grand scheme of things... plenty of people are capable of doing very well. Girls are more prone to be focused and study, less prone to goof off (esp at that age), so they got the best grades.
University is harder, and so it becomes more of a judge of mental ability. Also, everyone is more mature (supposedly), and the goofing-off factor plays less of a role.
Care all,
Zorn
 
On a side note, I remember seeing a study a long time ago, which used fMRI to investigate the brain regions being used while men and women were solving algebra problems.
There were striking differences between the sexes in the areas activated. This would suggest to me that it's probably hardwired genetic differences at work... though you can't entirely rule out socially-induced changed in brain structure.
 

I have a lot of masculine qualities (forward/direct/blunt, assertive, domineering, bossy, argumentative, etc)

Ok, a bit off topic but could provide some points for discussion. First, the qualities you listed are not necessarily manly anymore - I would think them to be more personality traits of an individual as oppose to something that's either appropriate or even prevalent in one specific sex. So in that way it's less manly and more you.
I believe you're at Stanford now so you probably run into a lot of these so called "smart" people - I see some crazy ones here at Yale. I believe these are interesting places to study concentrations of these over-the-top intellectuals because they really are, for some guys, seem somewhat effeminate and for girls less so. But I think that's more of an outside symptom - what is really going here is that these people are Socially Awkward and a lot of their behaviors are contrived, caricature-like of what we consider the true apotheosis of either male or female behavior. The reason why we decipher the male/female dichotomy the best, in behavior at least, is because it's easier to see or notice it. But I think, at least from what I've seen, a lot of these highly intellectual types are just a bit abnormal (socially awkward) and that can go in any direction - often smart males are too aloof and like to achieve stuff by themselves (hate group work, understandably). But because it’s a good ol' male quality, it somehow escapes detection of being more of a social awkwardness symptom (related to high IQ). Therefore, in short, - these people are just a bit off the "normal" social scale so focusing on male/female attributes may be too elementary and serves to obfuscate the issue by leading us to look at these traits as determining (or at least frequently present) factors while they are merely one of many possible and random traits possessed by individuals who, perhaps, had less time to develop the socially acceptable/standard traits (or, as I believe, are less prone because they are smart -and because they had less "free" time- to being brain-washed by the society to follow the prescribed patterns of behavior). Fairnymph, you decide if this is related to topic or not, but being as direct as you are, I’m sure you’ll know what to do if my post seems to be off the mark. And yes, I checked your name twice to make sure I don’t accidentally get it wrong, so directness and assertiveness are good qualities and demand attention from people. ;)
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: Xplore ]
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My proposal still (and again) holds.
On the other tangent, there is still not a total agreement of what composes "intellgence", and I think to exclude the emotional, or artistic or any other component would be somewhat wrong. I would attribute this to the social factor that you feel this way. This would almost be like saying that any one field was more "intelligent" than the other b/c they used more or less of one of these factors. If we want to operationally define the factor we are talking about, and equate intelligence with "doing well on 'x' text", then we could indeed say one sex was more intelligent than the other. We could also say one race was more intelligent, or that one country was more intelligent or one age level. But, in reality, we would be saying that they performed better on a certain measure. The most recent ideas of intelligence encompass way more than just typical educational learning.
Incidentally, I've always considered the women in my family as more intelligent :)
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: fizzygirl ]
 
fizzygirl, what's your proposal?
We exclude emotional/artistic measures by definition. Not to indicate that these are any less important nor to denigrate them.... but they are something different than intelligence. I have always thought of "intelligence" as a general measure of the someone's ability to learn new concepts, understand ideas, remember facts, and make cogent arguments... in my experience these things correlate highly.
Personally, I find that a person's ability to understand/do mathematics (proofs) seems to the "purest" measure of their intelligence... but that might just be my bias talking. The better someone is at math, the more easily they seem to master other fields/subjects they put their mind to. Most math majors I know could almost trivially figure out pieces of other fields, while even highly successful people in other fields often find mathematics too difficult for them. :)
Xplore--
Interesting points. I am all for the sociological study of "intelligent" people. I don't get to observe many over-the-top-intellectuals... I see the science/tech geeks, who first learned to interact with sci-fi novels and computers. :(
Care all,
Zorn
 
Originally posted by zorn:

Personally, I find that a person's ability to understand/do mathematics (proofs) seems to the "purest" measure of their intelligence... but that might just be my bias talking. The better someone is at math, the more easily they seem to master other fields/subjects they put their mind to. Most math majors I know could almost trivially figure out pieces of other fields, while even highly successful people in other fields often find mathematics too difficult for them. :)

I'd have to disagree here. I'm a computer engineering major at the university of michigan, so I've often pondered this issue, and known plenty of people in which to base my opinions on. I don't think that math is the most "pure" measure of intelligence. For example, one of my professors (and boss) is one of the most highly esteemed people in computer engineering. Absolutely brilliant person, and nobody disagrees about that. But he can't do math to save his life. He got his degree in philosophy because he couldn't hack the math in computer science. And now he is constantly winning awards and getting grants.
Another example to contradict your statement. Me. I am pretty damned good at math, even though I detest it. Some other subjects give me a really hard time. I can't do foreign languages for life of me. Anything where I have to memorize stuff just doesn't work. I have a bunch of friends that are just like that too, even to a stronger degree. A good buddy of mine gets perfect grades in all the really hard math and programming classes. He fails intro. to psych and intro. to philosophy even after putting a ton of effort into them.
I know I'm just giving examples, but looking at the broader picture I really don't think there is a strict subject that is the best way to measure intelligence.
Back to the topic... I believe that the intelligence difference between males and females is mostly environmentally induced. In most of my classes there are only a few females, so I really see this here. Many parents put more of an emphasis on learning and education and thinking on their male children than their female children I believe. And even more so than that, its not cool to be a book worm girl, but guys can get away with it a bit easier (but I still got made fun of, heh). The girls I know who are very intelligent have all been brought up with that being one of the important values that their parents encouraged. My girlfriend is extremely intelligent, and her family has encouraged that her whole life.
Now, another issue I wish to bring up... How much does intelligence (in a technical sort of way) contribute to someone's success? I think its not as linked as many believe. In the computer engineering department here, there is an amazing lack of free thinking creative people. These students can do the hardest proofs and integrals, but give them a project where they have to come up with their own ideas and they don't know what to do. Some of my friends (and me) excel at this sort of thing, despite their difficulty with some of the technical material. The guys (or girls) who innovate and create are going to be remembered and revered. Not the guy who got the best score on the math test.
Another interesting thing I've noticed is that the girls who do excel in computer engineering and other technical fields, often severely lack a sense of creativity and free thinking. I wonder why that is?
Great topic Fairnymph. Hopefully all that I wrote is understandable. I'm off to Florida for a week, but I wanted to get out my thoughts about this topic first. Take care everyone!
-tourette
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This thread is great and I’m very happy it didn’t disintegrate into some trivial battle of the sexes.
Ok, we’re defining intelligence – and such definition will be highly important in our quest – perhaps we should’ve even done it before we began anything else. I’ll have to agree with fizzy and tourette on alternative examples of intelligence that exist in our multitasking world. I didn’t even want to open that can of worms, but since it’s been brought up, it can’t be avoided. Intrinsically and ideally, intelligence should have little to do with environment and excelling at one defined way of thinking as oppose to another and another and another. Each has its own unique twists and turns and requires making use of information acquired earlier to apply to arising situations. In a broader sense, intelligence is defined as, simply: The ability of learn and to cope – ability to learn and understand or to deal with new or trying situations. (Franklin Dictionary) Now, this definition is obviously as applicable to math (with defined but evolving rules of the game) as it is to weaving (where new stuff could also come up and one has to cope and make sense of it). So going back to fizzy’s point, these various modes/types of intelligence have to be acknowledged but, if they were to be also incorporated into this discussion, could make answering fairnymph’s question almost impossible. With such undefined and freely-roaming intelligences, we’re unlikely to hold on to one intelligence type long enough to make a meaningful comparison between men and women – plus there’ll be too many (from art to math to weaving).
Zorn’s necessary rules-of-the-game have set math (and technical prowess) as the pure intelligence we’re comparing. I think – and it’s only my opinion – that males will be victorious in this particular and very specific struggle; they’ll be labeled smarter for many many reasons. Some of the reasons will be from our own experience/history – most math olympiads are won by males (indeed mostly males participate, and this may be a pro or a con here). From very early childhood, even under sociologically imposed equal conditions boys prefer technical games (such as puzzles and putting constructions together) while girls prefer emotional and language oriented tasks (imbued with communications of emotions and other alt. intelligences). Look at any logic games competitions or most puzzle book writers (and I do that a lot) – and you’ll notice male writers and male solvers. Of course, undoubtedly, this could be due in some part to environment, but this is also the case in other countries where such sex differences were less of a problem (like Russia, where most doctors are women and where women are more schooled than men).
Environment argument and Chess players: While I think environment is important, it doesn’t hold water in all cases, some of which are very relevant to this discussion. I’ll take an example I’m intimately familiar with – the game of Chess. The current world champion – Garry Kasparov – is my family’s most famous chess player. Everyone in my family, from my grandma to my parents and uncles/cousins are ranked chess players and chess teachers. I went to the same chess school as Garry and it is a common knowledge that there are NEVER ever women chess players who can compete well with male chess players. I don’t mean that no woman can ever beat a man in chess – my mom beats my dad frequently and that’s how they decide their vacation destinations. But the ranked/best chess players from the women side never ever come up to the level of the ranked/best players on the men’s side – that’s why when you hear about World Chess Championship you can rightly assume that there will not be a single woman there! So there’s the situation – chess was a passion of all in Russia (so NO environment argument) and certainly in my own family I can tell you that women are even more interested in chess than men. Yet the pattern holds. So basically, for many other reasons too, when you define intelligence in a way that zorn did, men seem to be more “intelligent.” I don’t know why this is so – just experience shows that men are better more often, be it programmers or be it mathematicians or be it chess players.
Last Point: defining intelligence in this math/logic way may be too limiting, though. I personally define intelligence as: an ability to follow a thread of idea, line of thought or pattern – weaving that fine thread through many intricate twists and turns and still make it out on the other end of conclusion. Reading a very subtle argument and picking out the pattern of thought – the writer’s cursor, I call it – is one way to look at it. In math there are similar situations. But, of course, propagating a specific pattern through any design, and picking out the faults in it when there are such – that could also be called intelligence, and certainly all the craftsman and philosophers and artists engage in this time and again, proving themselves intelligent regardless of sex. So from this angle men and women are equal in their capacity to think intelligently.
--Edward
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: Xplore ]
 
I think men and women have equivalent mental capacities at birth. But i think that men are better at utilizing the fuller functions of their minds; the disparity coming from women being handicapped by the molding socialization they are raised with. This hinders their ability to focus, and the additional emotional energy makes it harder to make decisions with clarity. And not to mention that it's still a man's world, and the tests and standards for intelligence are going to remain invariably skewed for a while.
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: liquidocean ]
 
I think men and women are exactly the same, except for one aspect. Women's hormonal wierdness (puberty) happens and is over and done with a few years earlier than men's.
If I said I spent a year or so on crazy emotion bending drugs you would not be surprised if I said I had a different outlook on life because of it. For some reason people don't see hormones the same way.
I think the age at which this happens is very important in forming a personality. As boys and girls are tied to the same educational systems it produces different effects. And don't tell me education has no effect on IQ, ideally it shouldn't but it does.
In my opinion, all other differences are social.
 
I think men are more smart in some areas and i think women are more smart in some areas.
It just depends on what the subject is.
I think women think more practical and rational than men sometimes. We understand that it's the little things in life that count.
Besides, women only have one brain to think with. They aren't as distracted!LOL ;)
 
I am rather stunned that hardly anyone has brought up the issue of the power dynamic between the genders as a factor. Just a tiny fact that studies have shown that teachers routinely are more likely to call on boys in class when they raise their hands has got to have an effect on how people define themselves and the way they develop. (I feel it in myself as a female teacher even - I tend to give boys deferential treatment. It's subtle but it's there.) The fact that in culture after culture females are routinely excluded from the occupations or activities that are most consciously valued, has an impact on all of our thinking about ourselves and each other.
My husband is enormously intelligent, and for years I devalued my own intelligence next to his, because of the air of authority with which he presents himself, and because of the deference with which other people treat him. I realized that I'm every bit as smart as he is; I just don't have an air of entitlement about it, because as a woman I don't feel entitled to that authority in society. Thinking honestly about the people I know, the women are every bit as capable as the men in terms of reasoning abilities, qualities of reflecting on and assimilating information, the ability to generate subtle responses to information, to synthesize both deductive and intuitive logic. They just don't brandish that ability as pennants on their intellectual sleeves in the same way, and don't try and use those qualities as mechanisms of control over others so much. Men do it in part because it's expected of them, and that behavior is approved of in them. Women are discouraged from showing those tendencies, and thought unfeminine if they do.
I'm in the arts, a very sexist area of our culture (quick, how many women composers can you name? painters?). I have to say that the women artists I know have all the depth of intellect and knowledge that the men do, they just doubt themselves cripplingly, whereas the men seem much more able to make artistic decisions with the clarity that accompanies feeling fully entitled to do so, vested with that power by the expectations of our culture. As a woman, I have to fight like hell constantly to be taken seriously about my thinking and my ideas.
I wish the "battle between the sexes" was trivial. But I think the dynamics of patriarchy are pretty huge and their effects pretty significant. My father is a mathematician. My mother never had a career. They're both rather brilliant, but my mother outweighs him by far in native intelligence and its applications.
[ 22 February 2002: Message edited by: beatbeat ]
 
Women are more intuitively smarter than men.. we're more feelers than thinkers.. I do think men tend to be more intellegent on the analytical side of things.. as women are more prone to excell artistically.. expression of our talents is the only way to really tell..
 
zorn..the "proposal" was for xplore..it's a joke carried over from a previous thread (sorry!)
My main point was that the people that study intelligence often do not exclude those other things from it. Many of the newest scales include the ability to be creative and to solve problems outside of math/science. However, if we are looking at intelligence as the ability to do well in math and math related fields, then I'd agree that men might be better in that. I just don't see that as the end-all of intelligence (and many in my field agree).
I was also thinking last night about the fact that I do see those women around me as being more intelligent than the men. I have two ideas for reasons re: this. One, being someone who was always interested in psychology, I place a lot of importance on being able to read a situation, react to it, emphasize with other people, etc. This is a trait expressed often by women. Psychology is a female-dominated field. Two, I think socio-economic factors have some to do with it as well. The area/class in which I grew up is usually composed of families where the father is some sort of laborer (in my family: railroad switchman, or prison guard, or construction worker) whereas the woman works as a teacher or some other professional (albeit non-executive) position. Therefore the women I grew up with held jobs that were stereotypically more "intelligent" than the men. The men held up the stereotype of "strong and protecting". I think people in the upper class might be more used to the fathers as business men or professional people, while the mothers had a career that was on some lesser level (in comparison). Surely this would make a difference in perception. I'm sure that fact that one is in a male-dominated field would also add to the perception that women are not as intelligent, if you see your field as the end-all of intelligence.
Do some of you really judge your friends/aquaintances on their intelligence?? I tend to think in terms such as, "Well..I'm better in ____ than this person, but they could kick my ass in ____". I wouldn't ever propose that one was better or worse than the other, just different. For this same reason, I don't see my field as more requiring more intelligence than art or music, or less than engineering--just different use of skills.
 
This is one of the most interesting threads I've read in a long while...
tourette-
Interesting -- my experience was completely different. I knew plenty of people good at math who didn't do well at other subjects, but always because they didn't care or refused to. One of the most intelligent people I know has terrible grammar/spelling simply because he think it's a silly arbitrary convention to follow.
It was a regular occurrence when I was an undergrad to see random people coming to the math/phys majors for help on completely unrelated class... computer science to biology to chemical and electrical engineering. The math/phys person could often look at the set and figure out the problem pretty quickly... despite having no previous experience in the field.
These fields just seem to require more of the analytical skills generally called "intelligence." I hate to sound arrogant, but I'm afraid I'm going to :( : the majority of my fellow math/phys majors always found most other subjects incredibly easy. The ideas are just pretty simplistic. One good friend of mine switched into chemistry from math (at a very difficult school) and was shocked. "These chem majors are always bitching about how hard their o-chem and p-chem classes are," he told me, "but they're a fucking joke. And I was never one of the fastest math people."
So I'm not sure what accounts for our differences of observation.... maybe it has something to do with differences among pool of people we know, maybe it's just random...
I agree with your point about the value of intelligence: creativity, hard work, and picking the right ideas are very important.
Explore--
Lots of good points. re your last paragraph: I think the ability to follow the thread of an idea is a great definition of intelligence. However it seems to me again that the natural aptitude for this is generally pretty constant across most things (though there are some glaring exceptions I am sure). We can't necessarily conclude "men and women are equally intelligent" from this though.... more data is needed.
fizzygirl--
Certainly the ability to solve problems outside of math/science is important for defining intelligence. However, I still hold to the rough definitions of intelligence outlined above... and I think (this is an empirical claim) that math ability tends to measure this pretty accurately... at least among the subtype of people I deal with.
Can you suggest any reading on the modern research on intelligence? I approach most claims of the more "humanities-oriented" side of psychology (as opposed to say cog sci) with a fair degree of skepticism... but I am always willing to read and consider arguments. :)
re: being in a male-dominated field. This is true, but my judgments are based on fellow students, not professors (of which I find it impossible to really judge the intelligence of). Since I have had the opportunity to see them working and learning, I think image effects like you and beatbeat discussed -- while certainly important for our perception of the intelligence of people at large -- don't play a significant role.
Sure, I usually judge the intelligence of people I know, although often (unless I've worked with them) can do so only roughly. I don't view this as making them better or worse per se... just something I judge, like I do their attractiveness.
I think psychology certainly requires more intelligence that art or music! You can be a fucking moron and still make great music. It's a different skill. All fields seem to require varying degrees of minimum intelligence -- I won't presume to rank them though! :) -- but you can find brilliant people in any field; though this doesn't necessarily correlate with success.
Care all,
Zorn
 
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