Recently (August, 2005) researchers “discovered” that Men, on average have a higher IQ than Women. Unfortunately, the Media has picked up this “news” and started plastering every visible publication with lines like “Men are more intelligent than Women”.

I find this kind of thing really annoying for two reasons:

1. The media are twisting the research to make an interesting story, and will no doubt damage the minds of many in-duh-viduals.
2. This kind of research is just about as useful as telling us that, on average, pouring water on someone makes them wet. I mean, tell me something I didn’t already know. The researchers involved are just trying to raise their profiles.

Dealing with problem number one first, there seems to be this misconception that intelligence is defined by your IQ. As far as I’m aware, your IQ only tells us how good you are at arranging and interpreting generic shapes and how good you are at simple math. I think it is academically accepted that this is no indication of your overall intelligence at all. Does being good at math make you more intelligent than a great writer, a great composer, or a great thinker? One of the favorite ‘revolutions’ in our thinking about intelligence comes from Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” - it’s the reason all the companies are asking you whether you “work well in a team?”. The corporates have for a long time understood that intelligence and capabilities are not a function of your math skills. Its high time the general public realized this too.

Now, on to the second point. Is anyone out there, at all surprised by this? I think this is another example of the terrible effect “politically correctness” is having at distorting the truth. I find it amazing how many people think that people invent stereotypes and generalizations just for fun. Generalizations are made because they are, generally, true. This is not to say they are always true.

There are many generalizations that indicate men have superior spatial reasoning skills. (eg “Women can’t read maps.”), likewise for general math and intelligence (so many, I dare not repeat them). Even generalizations that women seem to be proud of (eg: “Women are better multitaskers” - ask yourself, if your better at multitasking, then you must be worse at?)

Sure, when we hear a generalization we probably shouldn’t just accept it outright, so how could such a characteristic generalization come about?

Evolution seems to be a widely scientifically accepted explanation for much of our biological characteristics. (Please keep in mind Darwinian Evolution is a THEORY, not a FACT). So how could it be that women have on average, lower IQ’s? Given that IQ is highly reliant on your spatial skills, ask yourselves, for the majority of history, was it men or women who had to walk around dangerous forests looking out for prey and avoiding predators? Who sat around in the safe areas? Therefore who would have better spatial skills? Who would then have a higher IQ?

If evolution isn’t your thing, well then lets just take a look at the structure of the human brain. Men have more grey matter, women have more white matter. (Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers. [NeuroImage]). Is anyone still shocked that men are better at systematic, mathematical tasks? Is anyone still surprised that women are better multitaskers? (Ask yourself this, if we have two people, with the same brain matter volumes, one has a high IQ and the other a low IQ, what are the low-IQ persons brain cells dedicated to doing if they aren’t being used to increase the persons IQ?)

So in conclusion, this research has done nothing other than:

• Confirm what we already knew anyway. (We knew the volume of grey matter strongly correlates to IQ, and men have more grey matter. Therefore?)
• Give a whole new load of ammunition to closed-minded people.

Whilst I see value in confirming what people generally already know - just to check and make sure, I don’t think such a thing should be done at the cost of making so many closed minded people, even more closed minded. The researchers involved have obviously thought more of trying to make themselves famous rather than the implications of their ill-conceived publicity campaign. I guess the best thing we can hope for is that people start redefining intelligence to recognize IQ is not the only factor.