Date published: 2005/08/25
The BBC says:
Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women.
A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.
Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn claim the difference grows when the highest IQ levels are considered.
Their research was based on IQ tests given to 80,000 people and a further study of 20,000 students.
Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, told the Today programme on BBC Radio Four that up until the age of 14, the study showed there was no difference between the IQs of boys and girls.
"But beyond that age and into adulthood there is a difference of five points, which is small but it can have important implications," he said.
"This is against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement."
The academics used a test which is said to measure "general cognitive ability" - spatial and verbal ability.
This does not prove that (on average) "men are more intelligent than women", it just proves that men (on average) do better on these IQ tests (presumably largely designed by men). And what are the "important implications" that supposedly arise from this study? More importantly, why is this pointless "research" being funded? Instead spend the money on something more useful, e.g. (real) science and engineering.
Of course it is not unreasonable that if you take any measure in life, there are different distributions for men and women. The averages can be different and the standard deviations can be different. But focussing on any one measure as supposedly proving anything about anything, other than that one measure, is stupid, and will almost certainly encourage some malicious populist crackpot to then infer that women (or men) should be treated as second class citizens. And needless to say, you can play the same silly games with race, religion or nationality instead of gender.
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