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Male and Female Balance Sheet
James R. Flynn
Published: 2017/09/01
Abstract
This paper isolates gender differences in IQ that refer to the current generation of women in developed nations and where samples appear large and representative. At no age do such women begin an IQ decline vis-à-vis males. They suffer from a spatial deficit that might dictate fewer of them in “mapping jobs”. Against a male average of 100, they have a fluid intelligence of 100 (university Raven’s data) to 100.5 (Raven’s data from five modern nations); and a crystallized intelligence of 97.26 (WAIS data plus non-Wechsler IQ) to 100 (non-Wechsler GQ). No matter whether we take the lower values or a mean value, we would expect females to match males on mathematics and do no better than males at school. Both expectations are false. If there are genetic differences between men and women, these have more to do with character than intellect. First, women tend to be less violent and combative than men. Compared to schoolgirls, boys hand in assignments late, miss school more often, drop out more often, and must be disciplined more often. Second, women from infancy are more sensitive to other human beings. The ratio of women falls from dominant to rare as we go from social science to medicine and biology, to chemistry, to math and physics. There are two ways of viewing this progression: either women value math less insofar as it has no immediate human application; or women are deterred by the fact that math gets more difficult as you go from psychology to mathematics. Since either of these traits could be genetic in origin, I can see no easy way of obtaining conclusive evidence one way or the other.
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