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See how this opinion breaks down by gender, political spectrum and generation — and who shares your view.
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TL;DR: No gender is innately more intelligent.
Questions about how intelligence differs in males and females is a topic of heated debate in contemporary psychology. [Studies show] (https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Encyclopedia_of_Women_and_Gender_Two_Vol/guzbKF8vTVcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA964&printsec=frontcover) that most of the major tests used to measure intelligence are constructed to not show bias towards males and females, and often show no overall score differences. This is due to carefully written testing that eliminates questions that favour either sex, or matched with questions that favour the other sex to balance the testing out.
[Diane F. Halpern and Jonathan Wai] (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-intelligence/sex-differences-in-intelligence/C2918C9E4FC97CE772D74388A242DEA2) found that females, on average, 'score higher some tests of verbal abilities, especially those that require rapid access to phonological and semantic information in long-term memory'. On the other hand, males were found to 'score higher on some tasks that require transformations in visual-spatial working memory', and 'abstract mathematical and scientific domains'. However, these tests were based on a sample group, and therefore cannot be seen as completely accurate, and representative of society as a whole.
The view that women are more inclined to participate in art and humanities subjects, and men prefer scientific or mathematical subjects, is more to do with social constructs rather than innate intelligence. Basically, [socio-cultural perspectives] (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-intelligence/sex-differences-in-intelligence/C2918C9E4FC97CE772D74388A242DEA2) influence the way in which males and females learn from a young age, alongside the influence of sex-role stereotypes, which interact with hereditary factors of intelligence and help to determine the career paths which we choose and influence our educational interests.
Overall, I don't think that any gender is innately more intelligent than the other - intelligence is a multidimensional construct that is so hard to define!
Your analysis misunderstands the dynamics of large populations. You are correct that neither gender is more intelligent but that misunderstands the original statement. Intelligence (like pretty much everything biological) takes the form of a Bell curve when it is plotted. The shape of these Bell curves is not identical and hence intelligence is most definitely gendered.
https://pennswordtwo.com/media/cache/main_image/custom/domain_1/image_files/sitemgr_photo_8915.jpg
The link is to a graph showing what I mean.
Overall the vast majority of people are in the 'overlap' region where male and female IQ are comparable. If you take any man and any woman at random, statistically they will probably have about the same IQ and be somewhere near the mean. Average people are on average - average, who'd have thought lol?
But the crucial difference is at the extreme ends of the graph. So there are a higher proportion of super-high and super-low IQ males. We're talking roughly the top and bottom 5% or less.
So this is why there are more Nobel prize winners and Nasdaq CEOs who are men compared to women, but also why prison populations are overwhelmingly male and why young men kill themselves through reckless stupidity far more often due to more men being super-low IQ.
The basic reason for these differences are (again like pretty much everything biological) due to the nature of reproduction. For a woman to pass on her genes she needs to mate and then carry a child through at least 9 months of pregnancy and then roughly 2 years of breastfeeding. A man on the other hand can knock up a woman and drop dead 2 minutes later, his job is basically over from an evolutionary stand-point. So given this dynamic it makes a lot of sense for women to be of average IQ, not too stupid to endanger their child but not to smart so as to stick out from the herd.
Men can actually pass on their genes more effectively through reckless stupidity in some cases or through extreme high IQ and hence our species has evolved this way.
TL;DR: Gender, as a social construct, moulds our brain development
Many have dispelled archaic claims of gendered brains because this principle has so often been used by misogynists to argue for man’s superiority over woman.
However, I would argue that there is some truth to the concept of gendered intelligence, because our concept of gender is innate and influences our perception of literally everything. Humans love categorization – it’s how we understand the world around us. Gender is a form of this categorization, a way of grouping and simplifying certain traits, roles, and behaviours, and our feelings around them – we perceive and label certain traits as masculine and others as feminine. Historically, gender has been understood as a binary, but we are now beginning to flesh out our ways of thinking about gender to better represent our lived experiences of it, understanding gender as a spectrum. To emphasise human preoccupation with gender, think of languages like French or Spanish – these languages assign a gender to every single noun. Even tables are gendered! La table!
Even intelligence falls prey to our obsession with gender, partly because our experiences mould our brain activity. This is referred to as brain plasticity: our brains create new connections between neurons as a result of our personal experiences, which over time, change the structure of the brain. Of course, everyone has unique experiences, but certain groups of people are more likely to have more similar experiences due to the way that society treats them. Society treats men, women, and non-binary people differently: we exist in separate subcultures with different rules and expectations for every gender. As children, when our brains are particularly malleable and adapt very quickly, we are given toys in accordance with our assigned gender: girls are often given dolls to care for, whilst boys are given construction machines and vehicles. Professor Gina Rippon explains that “Toys have a substantial impact on the development of children’s cognitive and social skills, their perception of self and their career aspirations”: in short, a male child given Lego is likely to develop better spatial training (used in science, engineering, and robotics) than a female child who is given a doll to play with.
It is a kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy” that intelligence is gendered; our brains have the capacity to develop brain activity associated with any gender. However, I would argue that our gendered experiences in our current society affect our brains, and therefore we cannot escape some degree of gendered intelligence.
Italian genders the table in two different, and fairly obviously traditional, ways!
Il tavolo: the physical table
La tavola: the laid table
The carpenter builds 'il tavolo'
You'd call your kids 'a tavola'
TLDR: two different readings of question
The statement could mean two things - either that one gender is more intelligent than the other, or the way society conceptualizes intelligence is connected to how we understand gender.
Interpreted the second way, I feel the statement is true - society tends to consider those who are analytical to be intelligent whereas those who are nurturing to not be intelligent. This is tied into how society places values on traditionally masculine traits and demeans femininity (as defined in a traditional sense - feminine people can be analytical and vice versa), so by this reading of the statement, intelligence (as a concept) is gendered.
In the other sense, no, I don’t believe any gender is more intelligent than another.
Third option! I read the statement as meaning that male and female cognitive processes are different. That women's and men's brains work differently...
Maybe the whole thing needs a rewrite!
While it wouldn't surprise me to find out that one SEX is slightly smarter at certain stuff than the other, GENDER is an identity issue and it's borderline nonsensical to try to connect simple identity with something as hard to measure as intelligence.
Cognitive Psychology has long-standing research on cognitive differences - strengths and weaknesses, between the sexes, finding significant differences in spatial intelligence, analytical intelligence, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence.
Maybe Gender isn't the right word though? Definitely has a sex-based biological basis though. And of course, these are just averages, so they do not reflect on any given individual.
Yeah the statement is rather vague.
Saying the "level" of intelligence is "inherently" gendered would be outright wrong.
But what would be more accurate would be to say that intelligence can often come in a gendered "flavor" or "color". Which often either causes or is caused by our preferred methods of problem-solving.
For instance, they have tested children in hedge mazes after being given an initial look at the complete maze. Boys did somewhat better, but that was just a side effect of the particular test and not part of the finding.
The real finding was that boys would basically carry a map in their head, and look for fixed points to reference it to, such as a tower in the center and a sign at the entrance. Then they would rotate the map in their head accordingly.
Girls preferred more local references, and where to turn at each one. "Turn left at the hedge with the flower on it. Then right at the one with the bench." In a hedge maze, the visuals are relatively uniform, which put this sort of thinking at a disadvantage. But it's often advantageous around town or when given directions.
So I would imagine if you asked a man for directions you hear somewhat more "head NORTH for a few miles, then head EAST on 41". Whereas if you ask a woman, you might hear more "When you see KFC, turn LEFT and continue straight until you get to the church on your RIGHT."
It might be related to preferring memory or spatial reasoning. But it isn't super cut-and-dry.
The fact that these are mostly-overlapping bell curves should also be implied.
Of course intelligence is gendered. The mean between either sex is essentially the same but the distribution varies.
Would you share the research here?
It's touched on here too - 'Men are smarter than women'
This wiki page has links to some studies that suggest as much.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
I think people are confusing this with one gender is smarter than the other.
this is not the case, there are different types of intelligence and men and women are better at different types of tasks for example women have better verbal fluency and men have better spatial perception.
If we want to genralise women have a lot more smart people on average but men have a lot more really smart people but are dragged down by the amount of very dumb people this doesn't really tell us much useful information.
Intelligence is gendered in that men and women have brains that seem to be hard wired for different specialities in terms of expressing their intelligence. As has been written already, men are better at spacial and abstract thinking in some ways (as in reading maps) while women are better in terms of reading people.
Another way to read the statement is to ask the question, whether one sex has higher intelligence than the other.
I think, traditionally high intelligence, is measured by the abilities to create things or systems or abstract ideas that solve problems, rather than read or be sensitive to people. So by that criteria i think that men could be said to be naturally more intelligent than women, being better at the abstract.
However i must add, that i think it is a mistake and unfair to judge any particular woman or any particular man as being more intelligent than anyone else, based on their gender.
I have worked at places, where women have been the best and most skilled workers, at demonstrating traditionally male skills (they were better than their male counterparts, working in the same positions at different organisations) and i have heard tell, of men who were the best in people skills, at traditionally female dominated working roles.
I think as well as gender based strengths in intelligence, we must take into consideration, effort, commitment, experience, dedication and individual talent when assessing someone's capablilities regardless of their gender.
We should try our best not to allow our stereotypes of what they should be good at, to influence how we interact with them.
From chatting to several women who have jobs typically associated with men, I have found that they sometimes encounter prejudice, that they find oppressive.
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