'Men smarter than women' | Your Say

Houston: Women all over may not like it but it has been proved that men are smarter than women.

A study of 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) published in the September 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence, has confirmed a surprising new finding-that men have a 4 to 5-point IQ advantage over women by adulthood.

Because girls mature faster than boys, the sex difference is masked during the school years, which explains why the sex difference was missed for 100 years.

The new study, based upon an analysis of SAT scores that correlates to IQ, appears to confirm the similar earlier research, using a different methodology, that concluded adult men have IQs 3.3 to 5 points higher than women.

It also found that the g factor--the general factor of mental ability underlay both the SAT Verbal (SAT-V) and the SAT Mathematics (SAT-M) scales with the congruence between these components greater than 0.90, and that it was the g factor that predicted student grades better than the traditionally used SAT-V and SAT-M scales.

The male and the female g factors were congruent in excess of .99, and they favoured males to an equivalent of 3.63 IQ points.

The male-female differences were present at every socioeconomic level, and across several ethnic groups.

The average male advantage was found "throughout the entire distribution of scores, in every level of family income, for every level of fathers' and of mothers' education, and for each and every one of seven ethnic groups," said J Philippe Rushton, professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, one of the authors of the study.

The paper's results dovetail with those from several other recently published studies showing that men - surprisingly - have a four to five IQ point advantage over women by late adolescence and early adulthood.

Before that age the two sexes are equal in general intelligence.

As such, the findings overturn a 100 year consensus that men and women average the same in general mental ability.

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Because girls mature faster than boys, the sex difference is masked during the school years.

Since almost all the data showing an absence of sex differences were gathered on school children, this might explain why the sex difference was missed for so long.

For decades, however, psychologists have accepted that men and women differ in their test "profiles," with males averaging higher on tests of "spatial ability" and females higher on tests of "verbal ability." These differences were assumed to average out.

The authors of the study, psychologists Douglas N Jackson and J Philippe Rushton at the University of Western Ontario, conducted the study because two recent sets of observations had raised anew the question of sex differences in general intelligence.

The first was that the general factor of mental ability was found to permeate all tests to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, a "spatial" test may be relatively high on g (mental rotation) or low (perceptual speed), a "verbal" test may be relatively high (reasoning) or low (fluency), as may a "memory" test be high (repeating a series in reverse order) or low (repeating a series in presented order).

More than any other factor, the test's g loading best determines a test's power to predict academic achievement, creativity, career potential, and job performance. Hence, the question of sex differences became formulated more precisely as: "Are there sex differences on the g factor?"

Another set of observations concerned the sex difference found in brain size and the relation between brain size and cognitive ability. Studies published in 1992 at the University of Western Ontario by zoologist C Davison Ankney, and also by psychologist Rushton, showed men average a 100-gram advantage over women in brain weight (and volume).

Earlier, a study of 1,261 adults, published in 1992 by zoologist C Davison Ankney, found that men's brains were about eight per cent heavier than those of women.

A 1997 study in Denmark documented that men have about 15 per cent more neurons - the functional unit of the brain - than women.