Differences in ability between men and women

Introduction: Men and women are equal in rights—not in ability

Most people, be they men or women, agree that we all should have equal rights and opportunities. I would like say that most people include equal responsibilities and (lack of) privileges; however, here far too many women have a nineteenth-century mentality—matters of equality often end up as “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”. Still, there is a near consensus in the general direction of equal treatment—and, largely, this is good. What is less good is that media in many countries (with Sweden likely being the paramount example) insist that men and women are equal in the sense of sameness—and, backed by feminist pseudo-research and selective data filtering, they have managed to convince a disturbingly large proportion of the population.

There is a plenty of evidence to the contrary (cf. e.g. many of the links present in my discussion of feminism). Below, I will focus on one particularly troubling aspect, namely the presupposition that men and women are entirely equal in their ability to think, do a good job in a highly qualified position, etc.—and that any discrepancy in the rates men and women in any position must reflect something other than differences in ability (e.g. a patriarchal conspiracy to oppress women). This with the side-effect that equality of outcome, instead of equality of opportunity, is demanded.

I stress, however, that this page deals with the sexes as aggregates: Individual variations can be gigantic, and a female math professor will take the average male street sweeper to the cleaners.

Lists of scientists

For some reason, in the late nineties, I decided to make a list of the first ten scientists that popped into my head. The result:

Einstein^w
Newton^w
Turing^w
Gödel^w
Hawking^w
Marie Curie^w
Pierre Curie^w
Laplace^w
Joule^w
Ohm^w

(Note that this is not a ranking of scientists, merely the result of “free association”.)

Recently, I found this list again and noted that it contained only one woman. Because I am currently interested in the question of whether women (as a group) actually can be considered the intellectual equals of men (I have grown more and more skeptical over the years), I set myself the task of within one minute coming up with as many new female scientists of truly high value as possible. I only came up with one name, Ayn Rand, and she is not actually a scientist... Further, it can be disputed whether she actually is on the same level as the above names. (The list should have contained one indisputable name, Emmy Noether,—an omission caused by the form of the exercise. Cf. below.)

I next tried the same task for men:

Foucault^w
Leibniz^w
Dawkins^w
Bakker^w
Fleming^w
Bell^w
Edison^w
Hubble^w

Some of these are disputable, e.g. is Bakker of sufficient value, were Bell and Edison scientists? Still, the result is much better than for women. (But, again, this list contains odd omissions. Where are, e.g., Gauss, Darwin, and Feynmann? Bohr and Gell-Mann? Freud? Von Neumann? Unlike with women, the problem is not in a lack of strong candidates, but in weighing relative merits and finding an appropriate cut-off.)

So far I am lead to the conclusion that female scientists of true greatness are few and far between; in particular, considering that a part of Marie Curies fame comes from her being a woman—I doubt that had the Curies been the brothers Pierre and Marc, instead of husband and wife, Marc’s fame would be as great as Marie’s.

Now let us take a look at Nobel Prizes (thus avoiding the subjectiveness of my associations). http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/women.html^e lists the following female winners per prize (beware that in the sciences the prize is usually shared between several individuals, e.g. Marie and Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel in 1903):

Physics
1903 - Marie Curie
1963 - Maria Goeppert-Mayer

Chemistry
1911 - Marie Curie
1935 - Irène Joliot-Curie
1964 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Physiology or Medicine
1947 - Gerty Cori
1977 - Rosalyn Yalow
1983 - Barbara McClintock
1986 - Rita Levi-Montalcini
1988 - Gertrude B. Elion
1995 - Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
2004 - Linda B. Buck
2008 - Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

Literature
1909 - Selma Lagerlöf
1926 - Grazia Deledda
1928 - Sigrid Undset
1938 - Pearl Buck
1945 - Gabriela Mistral
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
1993 - Toni Morrison
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek
2007 - Doris Lessing

Peace
1905 - Bertha von Suttner
1931 - Jane Addams
1946 - Emily Greene Balch
1976 - Betty Williams
1976 - Mairead Corrigan
1979 - Mother Teresa
1982 - Alva Myrdal
1991 - Aung San Suu Kyi
1992 - Rigoberta Menchú Tum
1997 - Jody Williams
2003 - Shirin Ebadi
2004 - Wangari Maathai

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/all/^e claims a grand total of 789 individuals and 20 organisations as winners. With the above 35 female winners (36 wins, two of which for Curie), we would be left with more than twenty times as many male winners! Worse yet, a clear majority of the female winners have come in the non-science categories literature and peace—the last of which does not require intellectual accomplishment of any kind, and is often handed out for strictly political reasons (cf. my discussion of the Peace Prize). In physics and chemistry the grand-total of female wins are five—three of which belong to Marie Curie or her daughter! (And the last of which was 1964—odd in the light of claims of women being intellectually oppressed until the last few decades...)

Even in literature there is a male dominance—despite the claim that men’s superiority with numbers is complemented by a female superiority with letters. There is some evidence that this is true for individuals of roughly equal IQ; however, a man of sufficiently higher intelligence man will likely outdo a woman of a lower intelligence. Further, other abilities are beneficial in writing a ground-breaking novel than just “a knack for language”.

Certainly, there may be other factors than intellectual prowess involved, e.g. different priorities, conscious or unconscious discrimination, whatnot; however, I simply do not see these factors causing such a difference today. Note, for instance, that looking at the nineties there were 3 female winners each of the literature and peace prizes and a grand-total of 1 (!) in three science prizes; post 2000, the corresponding numbers are 2, 2, and 2. Thus, it is not feasible to blame the statistics on the different society we had fifty years ago. Further, consider that any discrimination by the prize committees would be likely to favour women: Sweden is a country where political correctness is given high priority, and common sense is often thrown out the window when the feminists beckon—to the point that media consider a minimal “deficit” in the number of female cabinet members a greater failure in a prime minister than a record-breaking budget deficit.

Differences in Intelligence

Men have higher IQ scores than women

Investigations into IQ scores show two clear tendencies: Firstly, men are on average more intelligent, leading women by several points—according to some sources more than five points. Secondly, men have a larger standard deviation than women. The overall effect of this is that men dominate the higher IQ reaches, and the higher the IQ grows the larger the dominance becomes.

This is highly significant, because IQ is a very strong (if imperfect) measure of intellectual potential, ability to think abstractly, solve problems, and so on—and is likely the strongest single predictor of intellectual accomplishment, workplace competence, and similar.

In particular, the precious few that make the greatest contributions are almost invariably of very high intelligence: It is not enough to take someone with an IQ of even 125, put him through tertiary and post-graduate education, and see him collect international acclaim—in math or physics it would be near unthinkable, and even in soft subjects he would have a hard time. Someone with an IQ of 100 will have problems even earning a bachelor (in those countries where grade inflation and lowered standards have not yet made a travesty of the degree). Intelligence may not be enough to e.g. win a Nobel Prize in physics, but it is more or less a pre-requisite.

But what about Marilyn vos Savant?

But Marilyn vos Savant^w has the world’s highest IQ! Women are smarter than men!

This is a specious argument. Consider that:

1. The mere existence of one extreme example says nothing. (By analogy, there are humans that are heavier than even a heavy lion—yet few would dispute the claim that lions are heavier than humans.)

2. The claims that she is the the most intelligent human base on tests made when she was ten (10!) years old, when she was found to be as intelligent as the average twenty-something. An adult test put her at roughly one in thirty million (according to the above Wikipedia link), which makes her roughly one of the top two-thousand-or-so globally—with a clear majority of the others being men...

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   Side-note:

   The old “intelligence age” tests systematically tended to exaggerate high scores compared to the modern “standard deviation” tests. Further, intelligence-test scores of children have only a limited value when predicting later adult scores, because children develop at different rates (in particular, girls faster than boys).

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3. As stated above, a high IQ is a pre-requisite for intellectual accomplishment—whether it also sufficient is another matter. Notably, Marilyn has, to my knowledge, never made any important discoveries or inventions, never published a significant paper, nor otherwise made an intellectual contribution that could not have been done by hundreds of thousands of other people. (Note that this makes her capabilities unproved—not disproved.)

   Further, there are claims (that I have not investigated) that her attempts at math and logic have contained many beginner’s errors.

   I have no doubt that she could have become a good scientist in the field of her choice. Whether she would also have become outstanding is another matter—and I would be highly skeptical to her chances of reaching the heights of Einstein, Newton, or Gauss. (As I would be with a randomly picked man of the same adult IQ.)

4. There are disputes as to whether the concept of IQ is at all valid and measurable above somewhere in the range 140–160.

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   Side-note:

   Consider, similarly, competitions in archery: A lower-level competition is about gathering as many points as possible; a top-level competition, in contrast, is about having so few screwed up shots that miss the bull’s-eye as possible. The same scoring system is used by both, but the interpretation of the score, differences in score, developments in score, whatnot, are very different; and a number that approximates the probability of hitting a bull’s-eye, would be a better measure in the second case. Theoretically, top-level competitions could degenerate into near-unavoidable ties, because misses become too rare, which would make changes to the competition format necessary—and thereby transforming the sport into something new. (Consider e.g. using randomly chosen distances to the targets, doubling the distance and repeating the competition after a tie, using moving targets, adding artificial disturbance, using imperfect arrows, ...)

   Further, the influences of chance, poor nerves, and similar, can vary considerably, giving the competitions very different characters.

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Personality types

On an MBTI scale women tend to belong to the “lower” sub-types of F and S, with correspondingly fewer reaching N and T—and there being several times more men than women who simultaneously reach both. (Cf. statistics on MBTI^e.) This, however, is a considerable handicap in the sciences, where higher thinking is required, and for intellectual development (but it may be acceptable in the arts). Cf. my musings on MBTI.

Moral development

In my personal observations, women tend to trail men in moral development—often by quite some margin: They are more opportunistic, dishonest, self-centered, and lacking in respect for others opinions and rights than men are. Furthermore, they are extremely hypocritical. Consider e.g. the tale of how a middle age princess grows up^e, which, while a caricature, catches so many typical female behaviours and attitudes spot-on.

Consider, to be slightly more specific, Kohlberg’s_stages_of_moral_development^w: Using this model of three stages, further divided into two sub-stages, moral development can be graded on an ascending scale from 1–6. Here, in my subjective impression, a typical adult women tend to land somewhere in the range 2–4 (with disturbingly many at 2, which is normally associated with children and sociopaths)—while adult men typically land in the range 3–5.

Views of others

It it striking how many great male thinkers, at least in the time before politically correctness, looked down on the intellectual level of women. Consider, e.g. the following quotes from Schopenhauer^e (1788–1860):

Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man.’

The fundamental defect of the female character is a lack of a sense of justice. This originates first and foremost in their want of rationality and capacity for reflexion but it is strengthened by the fact that, as the weaker sex, they are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies: [...]

[...] the most eminent heads of the entire sex have proved incapable of a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed of creating anything at all of lasting value: [...]

While I consider these statements to be both over-generalizations and unnecessarily harshly formulated, they nevertheless point to observations that I, myself, have made over and over again, both concerning individual women and when (as in this article) looking at group characteristics. Notably, the considerable increase in the quantity of education available to women has not substantially changed matters: The typical woman is half-way between a typical older child and a typical man; she is morally underdeveloped, lacks in rationality and reflection, etc., (compared to the already low standards of men); and, as discussed above, great contributions to arts and sciences from even the most talented and intelligent women are conspicuously rare—where not entirely absent.

Similar truths have been preached in more or less any era (read the Bible). Alas, instead of contemplating the possibility that these reflect fundamental and long-standing insights into how the average female mind works, far too many modern humans consider them outdated and sexist prejudices—or, in the case of many feminists, deliberate lies to justify oppression of women.

Looking at more modern sources, there are many who make the same observations, often with further going statements—including a female (!) self-declared misogynist^e, who has one of the lowest opinions of women that I have ever seen (outside of juvenile groups).

Murray and Human Accomplishment

Roughly one year after the original publication of this page, I encountered the Wikipedia article on Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950^w by Charles Murray. I have not had the opportunity to read this book, but from Wikipedia and a few other articles on the book, it appears to give plenty of evidence for the same phenomenon over a greater number of disciplines.

Looking at Wikipedia, eight of the nine top-20 lists included at the time of writing (Mathematics, Western music, Combined sciences, Western philosophy, Western literature, Physics, Western art, Technology) contain a grand-total of one (!) woman: Marie Curie, who reaches 41 out of 100 on the Physics list, and actually ranks below Pierre (a speculation on why^e notes e.g. that a joint Chemistry/Physics list might look differently). The ninth, Chinese literature, may or may not contain more women.

Further, in an interview, Murray says:

Q. Which woman scored the highest?

A. Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the novel "The Tale of Genji" a thousand years ago, has by far the highest index score – 86 on a scale of 1 to 100. But, that is in competition just with other Japanese authors, not all of the world’s authors. [86 is indeed very high. Goethe, as second in Western literature, has 81; generally, the score is the equivalent of second to fourth place in various lists.]

The highest-scoring woman in any of the sciences – no surprise – is Marie Curie in Physics, with a score in the 40s (on a scale where Newton and Einstein are tied at 100). The highest in Western Literature is Virginia Woolf [not in the top-20, cf. above]. None of the highest-scoring women in the other categories are major figures.

(http://www.isteve.com/2003_QA_with_Charles_Murray_on_Human_Accomplishment.htm^e)

Scrabble

A similar topic arose around a Swedish blog post^e, where I made the following comment (in translation, with minor alterations):

A couple of days ago, we had a debate on e.g. whether women can reach 50/50 among professors under fair conditions. Reading this [the linked-to] post, I contemplated sports and whether they can be used as indicators:

Firstly, we have to remove all too physical sports, but even where e.g. archery or pistol shooting is concerned, men appear to dominate (however, here women occasionally and legitimately beat the best men). Even in most equestrian disciplines, men appear to be slightly ahead on the world-class level, despite more women being interested in horses and riding (while it could be the other way around with shooting).

Remove everything physical and look at pure head sports: The most obvious example is chess, with a very clear male dominance. Chess may be too military for women to be interested or give men an advantage through spatial thinking. What, then, could give women a similar advantage? Scrabble! What does Wikipedia say about world champions. Well, for English^w there is no single woman listed as champion or runner-up over 19 years of championships. (Reservation for misinterpretation of names.) The Spanish^w and French^w (language) world championships contain a number of women, but men are still in the majority. Notably, as the sport matured, the proportion of (winner, runner-up) women decreased. This even though women should dominate completely based on in-born ability and (probably) larger interest.

Now the question is: Are these difference a sign of sex discrimination or of differences between men and women? (Not necessarily in ability—it could also be motivation, interest, competitiveness, family priorization, ...)

Occam says “differences”.

Is is likely that the same differences will affect who becomes a professor, a board member, or a prime minister?

Occam says “yes”.

Marilyn again

Interestingly, it appears that the above-mentioned Marilyn vos Savant has addressed a similar topic of men vs. women in general^e based on scientific provess (while the above focuses mainly on the upper extremes)—with a different conclusion.

Too look at a few of her statements with a critical eye (I strongly recommend reading her article first, for context):

The average IQ of females is equal to the average IQ of males.

This is a matter of dispute: Modern research has repeatedly (but not consistently) indicated a male advantage even on average. In addition, IQ tests are often deliberately constructed to give the same average, which could make a lack of difference misleading. (We should also bear in mind that IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence and that different abilities may leave people at the same IQ, but with different aptitude for e.g. science. This could strike in either direction, however.)

No evidence indicates that the sciences attract the brightest people. The unspoken assumption that science attracts the smartest people is the foundation upon which we have built the conclusion: “If the sciences are filled with men, men must be smarter, unless women have a good excuse for being absent.”

While the assumption part is true, the assumption is not a poor one and there is some evidence in favour of it (contrary to Marilyn’s claim; but, no, I am not aware of deep and detailed investigation of the best and brightest). Cf. [1]^e, [2]^e, [3]^e, [4]^e. More importantly, however, this misses the point: The sciences require more brain power than most other occupations—and the higher we go in success, the more brain power is needed (in particular in the harder sciences). If someone is a world-renowned physicist or mathematician, it can safely be assumed that he (as noted, men dominate here) is extraordinary in terms of intelligence. The one reservation that should be raised is that some proportion of these people may have loopsided mental talents.

Even professionally administered IQ tests are primitive measures of intelligence. Intelligence tests are fine for practical purposes, but not for analytical ones. Too much unavoidable bias (not prejudice) is present: Any test-maker (not just IQ test-creators) must first develop standards upon which the test-takers will be judged. In other words, to test intelligence, the designer must formulate a definition of intelligence. Now, who could possibly do this?

[discussion of problems with definitions]

This misses the point about extremes: IQ is but one example of men tending to extremes in a different manner from women, and IQ is just one indication of men having better cards when it comes to high-end success (and worse cards when it comes to low-end failure).

Further, if we look at averages, her statements merely amount to IQ alone being inconclusive—not to IQ being refuted as a measure of differences between men and women.

(Depending on her exact meaning, I would possible see the second sentence as turned around: Intelligence tests are fine for analytical purposes, in particular to make predictions about groups; but are far weaker for practical purposes, e.g. making predictions about an individual.

Perhaps most convincing of all are these facts from other outposts in the animal kingdom:

•Female chimpanzees learn complex tasks as easily as males.
•Female gorillas can be taught sign language as well as males.
•Female guide dogs are as capable at their work as males.
•Female dolphins perform practical jokes as often as males.
•Female parrots are able to mime and talk as well as males.
•Female rats and mice run mazes just as efficiently as males.
Would you prefer to adopt a male puppy because you thought you could teach him more tricks? No, you know better. (And we don’t find more female moths in our light fixtures!) Why should anyone think that human females are an exception?!

On the contrary, the convincing power of these statements is close to nil—even if we assume that they are true (the samples and investigations used are unlikely to be conclusive). Consider that anything can be proved with cherry-picked examples (a more holistic approach is needed); that language is considered an area where women have an advantage (and if we want to make conclusions about women based on other-species females, we have to allow the opposite direction too), which makes three of the six examples potential indicators of lower overall intelligence/ability levels in females; that practical jokes are not (to me) a sign of intelligence (and, generally, that quantity does not say anything about quality); that a deficit in one regard can be evened out by an advantage in an other (there is some evidence for women having a better memory than men, e.g., which would obviously affect speed of learning); that the issue of extremes is neglected; and that group differences (that need not be very large in order to have a major impact) may not be detectable in the experiments made.

As an excursion: Her initial statement

Yes, and in my opinion, upbringing is the No. 1 cause—not discrimination, conscious or not, from men. Just as significant is the fact (not the problem) that many women are far more interested in their families than outside work, and society clearly approves.

presupposes that it is society, not group differences, that are responsible for differences in behaviour. This is (at least when taken to exclusion) a highly dubious assumption that does not match the current state of science. One thing we agree upon, at least: Discrimination of women is a comparatively small issue in the modern Western world—indeed, in some countries, e.g. Sweden, women have the unfair advantage by a considerable margin.