Don't Make Errors in Articles About IQCouldn't resist poking fun at this one:
HALF the population will dismiss this story, but a study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women.
Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for “tasks of high complexity”, according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology.The first sentence is true, but the second contains one falsehood and one truth. The very smartest people on earth are men, in general. Nobody seriously disputes this. That's not to say that there aren't women among the smartest people in the world, just that there are fewer of them.
But there are also fewer of them in Special Ed programs, and fewer of them that drop out of high school, so that overall there is no significant difference "on average". What this means is that in terms of the bell curve, there are fewer women several standard deviations below the median and above the median:
They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees.
When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.What is amusing is the obvious reluctance of the authors to go against PC notions of gender equality:
Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were “no meaningful sex differences” in levels of intelligence.
“For personal reasons I would like to believe that men and women are equal, and broadly that’s true. But over a period of time the evidence in favour of biological factors has become stronger and stronger,” he said.
“I have been dragged in a direction that I don’t particularly like, but it would be sensible if the debate was based on what we pretty much know to be the case.”
