Study: Women Smarter Than Men

This one is bound to hit the men of the world pretty hard:

Women appear to have won a decisive victory in the battle of the sexes. Psychologists have found female IQ scores have risen above men’s for the first time.

The finding has been made by James Flynn, a world-renowned authority on IQ tests. “In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster,” said Flynn. “This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.”

Since IQ testing began a century ago, women have been as much as five points behind, leading psychologists to suggest embedded genetic differences.

That gap has been narrowing in recent years and this year women have moved ahead.

Well guys, they’ve always told us they were smarter……..

Couple Having An Argument image via Shutterstock

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Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. B Mullen says:

    It seems the ‘percieved” underdog has evolved w/survival skills that have come to fruition & then some.

  2. Moosebreath says:

    Impossible — if they were smarter than men, they’d never marry one, given all of the other ways they are superior to them. 😉

  3. JKB says:

    All the more reason to reduce the number of men in STEM majors so the women can achieve parity.

    Wait, that don’t sound right. Oh… I forgot we’re using Obamalogic.

    In the end, cats are smarter than both men and women put together.

  4. al-Ameda says:

    These articles are always interesting, yet I’m not sure these type of studies will hold up.

    Contemporaneously, college enrollment statistics of women over men, seem to be an indication that men are falling behind.

    According to Forbes, in 2010,

    “On a national scale, public universities had the most even division between male and female students, with a male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4. While that difference is substantial, it still is smaller than private not-for-profit institutions (42.5-57.5) or all private schools (40.7-59.3). The nearly 40-60 ratio of private schools was most surprising, though perhaps this is partly due to the fact that most all-female schools are private.”

    All I can say is, once women start to take over the engineering and medical professions, it’s really over.

  5. rodney dill says:

    We still get to kill the spiders.

  6. Just Me says:

    All I can say is, once women start to take over the engineering and medical professions, it’s really over.

    My girls are doing their part to make this happen. Oldest is a Bio-Chem major and my younger daughter intends to go into some type of engineering or a science/engineering combo like bio-medical engineering. Although male enrollment is still very high at the engineering/tech focused colleges. Friend of my daughters attends a technology/engineering school and he complains about how few girls are there (male enrollment is around 70%).

    Honestly, I am not sure IQ is a perfect measure, but I do think there is a growing college gap between men and women and at some point, schools may have to start an affirmative action program to raise male enrollment.

  7. Neil Hudelson says:

    I don’t understand…

  8. John says:

    Beginning around 1970, men were told to embrace their feelings and education was adjusted to favor the ways that women learn–the first time this had happened, ever. Classrooms have been conducted this way ever since. And today, while little girls are told they can do anything, little boys are told to sit still, be quiet, and behave less like the buffoons representative of men in TV.

    And we wonder why women now outscore men on IQ tests? Really?

  9. al-Ameda says:

    @John:

    Beginning around 1970, men were told to embrace their feelings and education was adjusted to favor the ways that women learn–the first time this had happened, ever. Classrooms have been conducted this way ever since. And today, while little girls are told they can do anything, little boys are told to sit still, be quiet, and behave less like the buffoons representative of men in TV.

    Just so I understand, are you saying that boys can’t learn if they’re in a somewhat sane and orderly learning environment?

  10. @al-Ameda:

    All I can say is, once women start to take over the engineering and medical professions, it’s really over.

    Men will probably keep control over engineering for quite sometime. There is a common test for Asperger’s which rates people on a scale of 0-50, with a score above 32 indicating the subject has the disorder.

    The average female score on the test is 15, the average male score is 18.

    The average biologist is 15. The average physicist is 19. The average Computer Scientist is 21. The average Mathematician is 24.

    So to put it another way, women aren’t suffering from enough brain damage to be good engineers. ;>

  11. rodney dill says:

    So to put it another way, women aren’t suffering from enough brain damage to be good engineers.

    In other words, Men are more likely to have The Knack

    Somewhat more seriously though I’ve recently seen some findings on the potential of the autistic that is obscured by standard IQ tests. I suppose some of this has been around for a while, it just seems to be coming out in the news again now.

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-hidden-potential-of-autistic-kids

  12. al-Ameda says:

    @Stormy Dragon:

    So to put it another way, women aren’t suffering from enough brain damage to be good engineers. ;>

    L O L

  13. mrk says:

    This is another case of misunderstanding and jumping to conclusions.

    First of all, “James Flynn”, the researcher of the article, has announced only marginal difference of 0.5 IQ points which is not statistically significant. Recently, in a lecture in Cambridge, he has complained that the media has “distorted” his findings and has gone beyond his claims.

    This marginal difference was found in only a few of his samles and other samples like Australia showed no difference between men and women.

    After all, there are lots of other researches in the past few years( esp after 2000) that show men are smarter than women about 5 IQ points after puberty.In fact Flynn’s claims has been rejected by many scientists beacause of his wrong interpretations of available data.