My IQ is more average than yours!
Today I was reading some argument somewhere about men's and women's brain sizes and relative intelligence, blah-dee-blah. I was lost in the comments to a blog post the article I had previously been reading linked to, and the commenters went back and forth quite a bit over a "proof" about women's lower intelligence on average.
The "proof" seemed to be that on IQ tests, men more often showed up in the extreme ranges, whereas women clustered together in the middle. This supposedly means that the geniuses are men, which naturally means that women are stupid.
What made me laugh is the consistent way everybody ignored the factor of the men who tested in the low extremes, versus the high.
The only thing these test results show is a generalization about women's IQs being somewhere in the middle. You can generalize about women's IQs, at least if you ignore the fact that IQ tests are bogus to begin with.
What you can't say is that men are smarter. In fact, the only thing you can say about men from the IQ scores is that with a man, you might get a genius... but you might just as well get an utter moron.
If you need smarts, wouldn't you be wiser to bet on that cluster in the middle range?
For stuff on gender and IQ, you can review the Wikipedia entry. Scroll down to "Variance in IQ" for a summary of the distribution.
The "proof" seemed to be that on IQ tests, men more often showed up in the extreme ranges, whereas women clustered together in the middle. This supposedly means that the geniuses are men, which naturally means that women are stupid.
What made me laugh is the consistent way everybody ignored the factor of the men who tested in the low extremes, versus the high.
The only thing these test results show is a generalization about women's IQs being somewhere in the middle. You can generalize about women's IQs, at least if you ignore the fact that IQ tests are bogus to begin with.
What you can't say is that men are smarter. In fact, the only thing you can say about men from the IQ scores is that with a man, you might get a genius... but you might just as well get an utter moron.
If you need smarts, wouldn't you be wiser to bet on that cluster in the middle range?
For stuff on gender and IQ, you can review the Wikipedia entry. Scroll down to "Variance in IQ" for a summary of the distribution.
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That is obviously an incorrect conclusion. 'The middle' is not the same as stupid! The averages should be the same, assuming the distributions are balanced for each sex.
I agree, speaking from pure actual experience, that when it comes to IQ test intelligence, men are indeed more likely to score at either end of the scale, while women are more stable than that, but that's not to say a female genius (Carol Vorderman) or dunce (Jade Goody) cannot exist, or that men can't be somewhere in the middle (still the vast majority of them).
Maybe you could actually point us to the post you were reading, instead of just whinging about it? Anyone who is serious about trying to claim that one sex is categorically more intelligent than the other, when there are about 3 billion of each of us and everyone's brains are different, seriously needs a good flaming.