Reply To: Why Are Men More Intelligent Than Women?

Ever since the Frenchman Alfred Binet devised the first intelligence test in 1905, study after study has confirmed the same result. Boys and girls may start out with the same IQ but by 16 or so boys are starting to inch ahead. When it comes to IQ, men and women simply are not equal.

A study of 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test published in the September 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence, has confirmed the finding — that men have a 5-point IQ advantage over women by adulthood. The study analyzed 145 items from the Scholastic Assessment Test in 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds. At each and every level of family income, for every level of fathers’ and of mothers’ education, and for each and every one of seven ethnic groups, males had higher G scores than females, the study found. The male-female differences were present at every socioeconomic level, and across several ethnic groups.

The paper’s results dovetail with those from several other recently published studies showing that men have a 5-point IQ point advantage over women by late adolescence and early adulthood. Before that age the two sexes are equal in general intelligence. By the time both genders reach 21, men, on average, score five IQ points higher than women. At the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one.

In almost 110 years of Nobel Prize history, only two women have ever won the Prize for physics, only four have won the Prize for chemistry and no women at all have ever won the coveted Fields Medal for mathematics in eight decades of trying.