Tuesday, February 25, 2014

I think I see the problem

Michael Seville contemplates the intellectual equality of the sexes:
You can’t go on forever saying “The game’s not fair,” when the game has been played ten billion times, under a billion different circumstances; at least, if you are rational you cannot, unless you are prepared to say in just what way it is not fair… Just what is that factor, common to all or most past history, which has interfered with the exercise of the intellectual capacity of women?

Some people love just stringing together anecdotes: women were prevented from exercising their intellectual capacity by this obstacle in Periclean Athens, by that obstacle in Confucian China, by the other obstacle in seventeenth-century France, etc. But an equality-theorist must do more than this. He has to offer some definite explanation of why the intellectual capacity of women has so consistently met with obstacles it could not overcome, and his explanation must be one which is consistent with the equality-theory. It would obviously be no good, for example, if he were to say, “The main interfering factor has been the aggressiveness, sexual exclusiveness, and superior cunning of males.”

This suggestion, considered in itself, is by no means without merit: aggressiveness, sexual exclusiveness, and superior cunning are definite and detectable things, and I at least believe that they actually do operate in males, and do impede, to some extent, the intellectual performance of women. But of course the suggestion is not one which an equality-theorist can adopt, since to ascribe superior cunning to males is to contradict the very intellectual equality for which he contends.
Ockham's Razor suggests that the reason women are perceived to be intellectually inferior to men is that they are intellectually inferior to men. The fact that so many women cannot follow this train of thought tends to lend itself as further evidence in support of the idea.

The primary problem here is is that most people confuse intellectual inferiority with inferior value. This simply isn't the case; if nothing else, it should be obvious that the vast majority of women place superior sexual value on intellectually inferior men. The quarterback is more highly valued than the chess club champion. And young men often do the same; the cheerleader tends to be more highly valued than the valedictorian. So, why is it suddenly so upsetting when someone observes the obvious?

It is simply bizarre to claim that the sexes are equal in cognitive capacity. They are not, and the intellectual liberation of women and the vast increase in the numbers women receiving advanced education has resulted in precisely what one expect: absolutely nothing. Where is the vast flowering of human intellectual achievement we were promised by doubling the number of human geniuses being liberated from patriarchal repression and given free rein?

Well, we have 50 Shades of Grey. And Girls. So we have that going for our society.

After forty years of feminism, it should be stone cold obvious why women are intellectually inferior; the smarter a woman is, the less likely she is to have children for various reasons, including hypergamy. And our society is arguably breeding smart women out of existence faster than ever before in human history.

How, precisely, is that intelligent?

50 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's hilarious is Churchians who attempt to cling to this notion of equality in any particular way that matters to the secular world. If there was equality in ability, why would Paul and Peter need to include specific instruction to treat wives with value as equal in co-heirship? Wouldn't equality of ability chase any question about other equality from the natural man's mind? It's one of those funny things of the Bible: We don't get instructed to do things we would natural want to do, and we don't get instructed to believe things we would naturally believe. Notice no special instruction on "water is wet".

Anonymous said...

When seeing the obvious is outlawed, only outlaws will see the obvious

Anonymous said...

Sometime I'd like to do some reading about IQ and find out whether it's true that men and women average about the same IQ. We're told that white men and women, for instance, both average about 100, with men having a flatter curve with more men at both extremes and more women clumped up in the middle. But since IQ is normed to sex and age group, that would be true even if the raw scores of male and female were actually very different.

School grades don't tell us much, because the schools are so oriented to promoting girls. The only fair tests are in the real world. There, we see that men easily win at high-IQ levels, but that could be due to their flatter curve. It's harder to tell how they compare in the middle. If you put a 100 IQ man up against a 100 IQ woman at Scrabble, or solving math problems, or answering trivia questions, would he beat her? And by how much? I'm pretty sure he would, but I don't know how large the gap would be. History indicates it would be pretty large, but I don't know if anyone's studied that. It seems like everyone focuses on the high achievers.

Laguna Beach Fogey said...

When you consistently anger your host population, ridicule and subvert the norms of the people among whom you live, made the target of special discriminatory laws and regulations, get yourselves thrown out of country after country, and made to suffer occasional programs of violence, all of this over the course of centuries, you might want to consider that it's not men who are the problem, but women themselves.

Trust said...

Imagine a pro boxer who lobbies and convinces the board to recognize him as world champ. Then, he expects the contenders to prove their worth. When one does, be then expects to win his title defenses by default without stepping in the ring. Thus is feminist touted superiority.

The old chorus should be updated. "Anything you can do I can do better, but shut up and man up and take care of me."

Respect me as superior, but keep me from proving it.

Revelation Means Hope said...

That Caddyshack phrase never gets old.

swiftfoxmark2 said...

After forty years of feminism, it should be stone cold obvious why women are intellectually inferior; the smarter a woman is, the less likely she is to have children for various reasons, including hypergamy. And our society is arguably breeding smart women out of existence faster than ever before in human history.

Interesting. Do you think intelligent women should be required to breed in order to obtain an advanced degree of some kind?

Anonymous said...

That quote is from the Australian philosopher David Stove. I am not sure how "Michael Seville" go into the act.

Marissa said...

If there was equality in ability, why would Paul and Peter need to include specific instruction to treat wives with value as equal in co-heirship?

What does this mean? I'm sorry, I don't understand.

Feather Blade said...

Alternate suggestion: women are naturally inclined to process and prioritize information (i.e. think) in a different way than men do. Because men and feminists see that the way women think is not the way men think, they are naturally inclined to assume that the way women think is wrong.

Natalie said...

But if an intelligent woman hasn't the foresight to see what she's doing to herself and her (hypothetical) children's generation by choosing sterility then is she really that intelligent? Shouldn't the capacity to love and serve other people through the traditionally domestic/feminine sphere be counted as a kind of intellectual capital? My husband is better at understanding scientific arguments. I'm better at making aesthetic choices about our home. He reads obscure historical texts. I like an occasional night at the symphony. I'd like to think that between the two of us we can raise smart kids who value beautiful things (ie traditional Western Culture and it's intellectual tradition).

Anonymous said...

Natalie, yes. That used to be understood. Mothers passed on the culture.

Trust said...

Remember, intelligence and how you use it are two different things. Intelligence is particularly destructive when used by those who lack sense, are shortsighted, naive, or narcissistic.

Remember, few of history's calamities were caused by the villiage idiot, but several can be credited to renowned genius.

stareatgoatsies said...

It is simply bizarre to claim that the sexes are equal in cognitive capacity.

It's an obvious point, but to call it bizarre you have to reject IQ tests as a measure of cognitive capacity.

Anonymous said...

Natalie, the problem is that the feminists and equalitarians insist that women are equal to men in "cognitive capacity," to use Vox's phrase. They're not willing to say, "Yes, men are more intelligent than women; but women are more nurturing, personable, whatever, and those things have value too." Women have to be equal or better at everything. So they either try to muddy the waters by inventing other kinds of smarts like "emotional intelligence"; or they just claim that mean old men are holding back smart women, so the only reason they aren't founding half the tech companies and winning half the Nobels is that men are preventing them. They want nothing to do with your complementarian attitude.

Intelligence, cognitive capacity, raw mental processing power -- whatever term we use -- is a pretty specific and well-studied thing. Aesthetic sensibility and music appreciations are different things -- important, valuable things, but different. There's no need to find some things women are better at and shoehorn them into the definition of intelligence to try to satisfy feminists. Men (speaking in general, of course) are better at thinking things through, solving problems, developing abstract ideas. Women are better at some other things. That shouldn't be so hard for people to deal with.

It's funny: the conventional wisdom today, probably more than any other time in history, insists that IQ isn't real, that intelligence (whatever it is) is overrated, and that anyone (except maybe the seriously retarded) can achieve anything he wants if he puts in 10,000 hours of practice. At the same time, we hate any suggestion that someone might have more of this quality -- which we insist is meaningless -- than others do. It's at once useless or nonexistent, yet so threatening that it's impolite to mention it.

Anonymous said...

It's an obvious point, but to call it bizarre you have to reject IQ tests as a measure of cognitive capacity.

No you don't. As I mentioned in my first comment, IQ scores are normed for sex and age group. If you're a 30-year-old man, your 100 IQ means that half the 30-year-old men scored better than you and half scored worse. It doesn't tell you anything about how you scored compared to women.

Looking at it from the other direction: let's say an IQ test has 100 questions of equal value (I know, they're more complicated than that, but go with it for the example) and was given to a bunch of 30-year-old men and women. If half the men score below 70 and the other half score above 70, then 70 will be their median, and a man scoring 70 will be said to have an IQ of 100. If half the women score below 60 and the other half score above 60, then a woman scoring 60 will also have an IQ of 100, despite getting 10 fewer answers correct.

So your IQ score only tells you where you rank among your age and sex group. It tells you nothing about how you compare to other groups. You'd have to look at the raw scores for that, or you could look at other tests which aren't normed (I think), like the SAT/ACT. Anyone know how the median male/female scores compare on those tests?

mickeypavic said...

Given that the supposedly most intelligent women have given up on their own biological, social, cultural and family perogatives to make someone else a little more money shows that they weren't intelligent to begin with.

Modern education rewards 'obedience' not intelligence, its an inversion, the tip rats and welfare queens are the intelligent ones, they are being punished through welfare for a lack of obedience (and yes welfare is calculated punishment). Good 'jobs' are just merit badges for those most obedient to the power structures.

A broken horse that knows when to pull left or right isn't more intelligent than the horse that refuses to be trained, it is simply more obedient.

Marissa said...

Despite a growing body of evidence demonstrating that the test consistently underpredicts the academic ability of young women (see Examiner, Winter 1996-97), the SAT gender gap actually increased by one point to 40. Females now score 36 points below males on the Math portion of the SAT and 4 points lower on Verbal. The ACT gender gap grew by one-tenth of a point to .3, the equivalent of about 12 points on the SAT.

From here: http://fairtest.org/sat-act-gender-gaps

stareatgoatsies said...

As I mentioned in my first comment, IQ scores are normed for sex and age group.

And it is therefore impossible for researchers to look at the un-normed data and compare men and women's IQ? Right, no it's not.

Revelation Means Hope said...

Natalie,
don't confuse intelligence with wisdom. They are completely different. You can be pretty dumb and still have wisdom, and be pretty smart and still be foolish.

Also, we seem to have a tendency in our society to confuse intelligence with credentialism. Just because someone jumped through all the hoops to get certified (think college degrees) doesn't mean they are actually smart. I've met plenty of masters degree holders who are barely above 100 IQ.

Anonymous said...

@ Cail Corishev
“Sometime I’d like to do some reading about IQ and find out whether it’s true that men and women average about the same IQ. We’re told that white men and women, for instance, both average about 100, with men having a flatter curve with more men at both extremes and more women clumped up in the middle. But since IQ is normed to sex and age group, that would be true even if the raw scores of male and female were actually very different.

…IQ scores are normed for sex and age group. If you’re a 30-year-old man, your 100 IQ means that half the 30-year-old men scored better than you and half scored worse. It doesn’t tell you anything about how you scored compared to women.”

Cail, IQ scores are normed for age but NOT for sex. So if you are a man with an IQ of 100, this tells you that half the people (male and female) will score above you and half below you. I have experience administering both the Woodcock-Johnson and the Wechsler, and the norms for both those IQ tests are the same for males and females (but not, of course, for age).

The reason this is so is because IQ tests are constructed specifically to eliminate differences between males and females. So if a given question shows a large difference between males and females, it is generally eliminated from the test during development. IQ tests literally cannot detect IQ differences between males and female because of how they are constructed.

From Psychology Today:
“The first, and in many ways most important fact—and one that may surprise many readers as it did me when I first found out about it—is that items showing large sex differences are always omitted from IQ tests such as the widely-used Wechsler. The result, of course, is that standard measures of IQ systematically obscure sex differences in intelligence”
source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-imprinted-brain/201003/sex-and-iq-dont-ask-we-dont-want-know

Compare that to a test like the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation, which does give separate norms. This is because boys’ speech articulation lags girls’ by about six months.

I suspect that males’ average IQ would be higher than females’ if IQ tests didn’t by their very design mask this difference.

- Sunshine Mary

stareatgoatsies said...

I suspect that males’ average IQ would be higher than females’ if IQ tests didn’t by their very design mask this difference.

I haven't seen any that put the difference higher than 5, and it seems to be decreasing the more education women get. In any case there's no way it rises to the level of equal cognitive capacity being a bizarre claim.

Weouro said...

No you don't. As I mentioned in my first comment, IQ scores are normed for sex and age group. If you're a 30-year-old man, your 100 IQ means that half the 30-year-old men scored better than you and half scored worse. It doesn't tell you anything about how you scored compared to women.

It's like the female snowboarder who is "the most decorated" athlete in the sport. She has more Olympic gold medals than any of the male snowboarders, so obviously she's just as good as they are.

Anonymous said...

This is good on male > female creativity. It may be partly g, and partly personality:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/05/g-and-creativity.php

In any case, David Stove's argument (incorrectly attributed above to "Michael Seville"), is an inductive argument based on women's historical lack of intellectual achievement. For example, he notes that monasteries of men were creative institutions; nunneries rarely.

LibertyPortraits said...

Clear, precise, brutal. The way Vox always beats these horses to death before anyone else has a shot at kicking the carcass.

Anonymous said...

Cail, IQ scores are normed for age but NOT for sex.

Really? I was sure I'd read multiple places that they are, but it sounds like you're more of an expert on the subject than I am. Could it be more of them used to be, before they figured out how to balance them?

Too bad that PT article doesn't specify which questions were eliminated to pull down the male average. If they're eliminating math and as much logic as possible and going heavy on matching items, that could explain a lot. When I took an IQ test 30 years ago (I don't know which one), I seem to remember it being more comprehensive than that, but that was a while ago.

Unknown said...

La Griffe du Lion has done a credible analysis of this subject. The chief finding is that women are about 2.5 IQ points less intelligent than men, *with a variance ratio of 0.916*. The variance ratio is by far the larger factor in the observable differences in male - female intellectualism.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/g.htm

Laguna Beach Fogey said...

LOL @ everyone debating IQ scores.

Fools.

Unknown said...

Uhh, why? I.Q. scores are necessary to explain the world we live in.

Matamoros said...

I have read that IQ and standard tests such a the Nation Merit Scholarship tests are weighted in favor of women to norm them. How much does this play out in skewing the results in IQ and these tests? Any one know?

Anonymous said...

https://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/on-intellectual-capacity-of-women-2989

APL said...

Julian: "https://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/on-intellectual-capacity-of-women-2989"

Intriguing that of the three links at the bottom of that page, two including the one to the full text of Stove's essay are dead.

Marissa said...

I meant to say more with my post. The source was some group decrying the possibility that young women might be less academically inclined than young men by calling the tests unfair. What's crazy is that perfect scores on the math portion are 2:1 male. All scores above the 70th percentile are more likely to be male.

Marissa said...

Here's one of the dead links, the full text of Stove's essay: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/women.html

I think the other link was to the old bookstore, but it was likely a link to buy Kimball's book. Now their bookstore leads directly to Amazon.

Anonymous said...

The problem with looking at college placement scores (which I remembered after bringing them up) is that the test-takers are self-selecting. So it's easy for the equalitarians to claim that smart girls and/or dumb boys are being discouraged from taking the SAT, or that girls aren't being prepared as well, or there's some version of stereotype threat (girls are bad at math, ya know) suppressing their results. Now that more girls attend college than boys, they can (and do) even make the argument that that means more marginal girls are taking the test than boys, dragging down their averages. (That sounds reasonable, but the gap has actually closed a little since more girls started going to college.)

I suppose the same thing is true of IQ, to some extent: you're a lot more likely to take an IQ test if your IQ is unusually high or low. If you seem average, no one cares what your IQ is. But if you seem really smart, you might get tested to get into a high-IQ club or some sort of gifted program, or just to satisfy your curiosity; and if you seem very slow, you might get tested to qualify for assistance (at least before the courts started outlawing IQ testing for that). So both extremes should be over-represented among IQ test takes, while just the high end is over-represented on college entrance tests.

In any case, if they've fudged IQ tests to balance the scores between men and women by leaving out whole types of cognition, then they might as well be sex-normed, because they don't tell us much about the real difference. We'll just have to go on waiting for women to start inventing, discovering, and fixing things at the same rate as men, I guess.

Marissa said...

Good point on the self-selection, Cail. The "fairtest" website brings that up. More girls take the test than boys. It still doesn't wholly explain the 2:1 male-female ratio in the highest percentiles of the math portion. From scores 750-800, boys totally dominate. See here: http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2011/10/14/huge-gender-differences-persist-on-sat-math-test/

Also, girls have done a little worse (after an initial rise) in recent years, if you see my quote of the link above about how the "gender gap" increased.

Anonymous said...

The UNSW link was available for years. I noticed it was down yesterday too. Maybe feminist censorship, or maybe academic incompetence and laziness in maintaining the site.

In any case, the full essay is available in Stove's Cricket Versus Republicanism, of which I have a copy.

http://www.amazon.com/Cricket-versus-Republicanism-other-essays/dp/0646213288

Anonymous said...

Marissa,

Yeah, I think except for the willfully blind, everyone realizes boys (as a group, of course) are better than girls at math, and that the gap is huge at the high end. But apparently most people also believe that girls are better in other IQ-testable areas, enough to balance the math difference. Yet I don't see many people listing those areas. Even in verbal skills, with which girls supposedly have an advantage, boys do just a bit better on the SAT.

If these two things are true:

1. There is a big gap between males and females on math.
2. Male and female mean and median IQ are practically identical.

Then one or more of these must be true:

1. Math ability isn't relevant to IQ. (laughable)
2. Women have some other areas of IQ dominance that balance the math difference. (yet unidentified?)
3. There are enough extra really dumb men who drag down the male curve and balance the math advantage (a bit tricky, statistically speaking, because that should drag down their other scores and make #2 identifiable)
4. Math and other "boy" skills have been specifically removed from IQ tests. (apparently possible)

In that La Griffe du Lion interview, I noticed that the tests he used to get that 2.5-point difference were pretty light on math:

CBEST (California basic skills, given to teachers) 1/3 basic math skills; given its purpose I'll go way out on a limb and guess that it's not terribly challenging
LSAT (no math, but a logical reasoning section at least)
bar exam (I'm guessing similar to the LSAT)
SAT (formerly 1/2 math, but reduced in importance in recent years)
ACT (about 1/4 math, I think, and there's probably some math in the science part)

It'd be interesting to see how the results would vary if there were more math- or logic-heavy tests. I suppose it's not an accident that those aren't so popular these days.

Unknown said...

You're right Cail. Griffe's tests are as generous to women as it's possible for tests to be. But a variance ratio of .916 in conjunction with a 2.5 point difference means a lot at the extremities. It means, for instance, that 67% of people with IQs 120 or higher are men. This is why men are so dominant in all areas of intellectual endeavor yet devised.

Anonymous said...

Oddly, the highest IQ found by Terman was reportedly over 200 and found in a black girl.

But, yes, the higher the IQ, the more men dominate.

I believe there is supposed to be an underlying intelligence factor, g, for general intelligence I think, which is more accurately tested in some tests than in others. Raven's Matrices is supposed to be good for that.

Lynn and others have done metanalyses and found that men are a few IQ points on average higher than women. One complicating factor is that girls develop intellectually faster than boys, and tend to do especially well in high school. Boys and men only start catching up and overtaking females in late teens and early adulthood.

It is almost as if the entire system is set up to advantage girls. I doubt that. But it is mighty strange the way it works. Girls are more studious and better liked by teachers too.

It is completely not-OK to say it, but the difference in IQ between races and sexes is pretty well explained by relative brain size. Men have slightly larger brains than women and are slightly smarter too.

Doom said...

Most men fight feminism directly. There is no need. Ask whoever, some men do sit to pee now, is suggesting that men and women are equal, playing absolutely dumb, to explain, as if you were a child, how they are equal. Don't let them slide, don't let them off with "because", but don't even get all that involved, certainly don't become animated. Let them eat themselves, their own ideas. And they will, there is no other logical conclusion. I have done this on dozens of occasions, when I have the time or interest. After a Thanksgiving dinner is great, helps with digestion and gives. Can't lose if you have even half a brain. It's more than what you are facing off against.

Mostly I just quash the notion in three sentences or less, whichever leads to tears the quickest (have to be able to read your audience). Yum! You actually get dates, or sex on the side if that is your gig, from these things done in public discourse and done correctly (not hard to do). Women really do dig it. Double yum!

Paul, Dammit! said...

Everything I needed to know about average women I learned from looking at the magazine rack at my local grocery store.

OK, granted, this is a niche example writ small... yet with unrestrained capitalism being the leveler, these magazines would not be there if they didn't sell.

Remember, this is lower-common-denominator pablum- so we can look at what the folks smack in the middle of the bell curve are buying to feed their mind... but to be fair, lets drift away from the impulse-buy magazine rack at the register, and move onto the real magazine rack at the super-supermarket.

For men: Guns, outdoors, hobbies, health, fitness, style, entertainment.
For Women: celebrity, homemaking, gossip, sex

Enough said. For me, this is a more poignant measure of things on the pointy end, to see what's happening when no one's looking.

Unknown said...

I think it would also be fair to say that women as a group excel in other mental areas. Male achievement is based on cold, hard logic, problem-solving skills and a desire to be the best provider he can be (to himself, to a woman, to a child and to the tribe). Female achievement is based on careful mate-selection, ability to perform multiple tasks or new, strange tasks and child-rearing/education. Even intelligent women find it harder to process figures and deal with pure logic than intelligent men do. Yes, they perform better than the average person, but it's taking up far more of their cognitive capacity. It's like a very intelligent person having dyslexia or schizophrenia. They may be able to function normally or even far better than average, but it's more mentally taxing because they're doing something their brain isn't quite made to do (read words and rationalize-out hallucinations). Yes, there will be exceptions, but exceptions are always besides the point. Quite simply, it's not that our brains are inferior, it's that they're wired completely differently, to serve entirely different purposes. It's like asking if a lioness is smarter than a lion or a male rat is smarter than a female one. Both serve their purpose. Try them with different tests and each group will excel in some and fail in others.

The problem with modern society is that we've come to value being a man as superior, so everything men have traditionally done is viewed as the 'top' and everything women have traditionally done is viewed as the 'bottom'. Dealing with fight-or-flight style business stress? Important. Dealing with annoying noises and continual risk of minor problems? Not important. Processing numbers? Important. Teaching language? Not important. Being calm and logical? Important. Being emotionally sensitive and kind? Not important. No wonder so many women want to be men.

Marissa said...

Inferior doesn't mean unimportant. It simply means not as important. Women's duties as wives and mothers were held in high esteem until the feminist war on traditional feminine roles. And while childrearing and homemaking is very important, it simply doesn't happen without food, shelter, protection, etc.

Shaun said...

Um so like.. you said that being smart doesn't get you laid. So what's up with this blog

Trust said...

@Shaun

Oh boy.

Yes, this blog teaches people to be smarter about women, but it isn't the smarts that gets them laid.

Unknown said...

"And our society is arguably breeding smart women out of existence faster than ever before in human history."

By this logic of only "dumber" women breeding - does this not mean we're breeding smart men out of existence as well?

Unknown said...

Amy that's a great question!

The answer is "yes, for the most part, when smart women of g0 don't have babies, that lowers the average intelligence of g1's girls and its boys".

The reason for this is that most genes with higher intelligence are autosomal, meaning they occur on one of the 22 non-sex specific chromosomes. So the less intelligent women who are still breeding bequeath their less intelligent alleles to both their sons and daughters.

However, it's probably true that not all intelligence-boosting alleles are autosomal. As long as smart men continue to have more babies on average than dull men, and smart women continue to have fewer babies on average than dull women, the prevalence of the Y-chromosome specific intelligence boosting alleles will continue to increase, while the average number of autosomal boosting alleles will decrease. (Genomes producing lower IQs have higher entropy than genomes resulting in higher IQs, so the default thing to happen in the absence of positive selection pressure is that intelligence decreases. When breeding patterns relax selection pressure for intelligence, as they have these past fifty years, intelligence *must* consequently drop.)

This means that if current trends continue, men will become relatively smarter than women over time. It makes sense, doesn't it? Evolution rewards the breeders and punishes the infertile.


Unknown said...

Based on the comments, there seems to be a significant amount of statistical data to back up the central argument of this article. With that in mind, I'm not going to dispute the idea that in general, men score better that women on a number of tests across a variety of subjects. These better scores would then suggest that men are smarter than women in general.

However, there's an obvious reason that feminism refuses to acknowledge those facts. Not ALL men are smarter than ALL women. So, in order for women who are exceptionally intelligent to succeed professionally, there needs to be a movement that combats the general perception you're arguing above. I'm a woman who graduated from a top university who now works a great job in manufacture operations, which is largely a male-dominated field. I am smarter than a lot of people I work with, both male and female. It really bothers me that I could be passed up for a promotion because my male superiors agree that ALL men are smarter than ALL women.

While I'm not exactly losing sleep over it because I think my works speaks for itself, I think it's ridiculous and unnecessary that I have to worry about whether or not my male superior can discern the finer points of an argument when he sees a headline that reads, "Tests conclusively prove men are smarter than woman." So my natural inclination, despite statistical evidence to the contrary, is to dispute that statement in protection of my own interests.

Also, about the last line of this article -- let's not equate intelligence as we're discussing it here with "concern over the advancement of the human race." We live in a world where we are expected to act in our own self-interest; deciding you value your work over having children -- even if it's at the expense of generations to come -- is absolutely not an unintelligent decision in and of itself.

Desert Cat said...

Jennifer, smart men (and women) don't have any trouble distinguishing between the concepts of "on average" and "ALL".

Yes, it is ridiculous and unnecessary to worry. If he's that dull, you should have no trouble taking his job or going around him.

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