Why is it that men on average have higher IQ scores than women?

Question

http://health.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1224255.cms

Answer 1

men have two brains, one in the head, the other in the gonads,makes them more smarter

Answer 2

Some studies have shown that there are more men with IQ's above or below average, compared to women. They found there were more women at the mean compared to men.

The ratio of men to women with a particular IQ appeared to increase the further away it was from the mean. So whilst men make up the majority of geniuses, they also make up the majority of intellectually challenged individuals, which balances things out.

Hope this helps : )

Answer 3

When my bf gets a flat tire, I fix it. He won't even stick around to learn how to do it. One time his car wouldn't stay running and it seemed to me the choke was stuck shut inside the carburator. Finally he came to me after a week of swearing to ask if I could look at it and see if I might notice something he had not. I took a square edge C clamp, and clamped it on the side of the carb, the far edge of the went far enough in to stop the choke from closing all the way. He wasn't using an air filter at that time.He did not speak to me for a week because of that. He once threw away a pair of shoes, declaring them unlucky. He has lactose intolerance, and eats a diet of almost pure dairy. I have to buy food a little at a time because he's like a dog, if you give him enough food to last a week, he'll eat it all in an hour, and starve the rest of the week.
I ask him if he has any plans for retirement(he's 43) because he is a very physical man, but when his body starts to tire faster, how will he keep himself occupied?
He said "what do you mean, I'm not going to retire."
I said "What do you mean, what do you mean?" A playful argument ensued but even at the end he absolutely WOULD NOT admit he'd reach 65.
One time he fed me a BS story and when I said it didn't make any sense, he told me:"Everything doesn't have to make sense all the time, you know!!"
Really !!! Is that right!! LOL what a moron.. He's dumb as a post, and he's a full ten years younger than him. He can count on me to take care of the responsibilities, but I cannot count on him. In five years, not once has he been there when I needed him, and I've got kids to look after, I cannot put them on hold while he figures out how to be a man.

Answer 4

5 points?

Heck, they don't even say what the margin of error is.

Mostly, it's a "difference" that IS no difference.

I gather this is a meta-study -- looking at lots of results over lots of instances of test-giving.

Women are more likely to experience test anxiety, which reduced scores.

I have also read that men tend to be more spread out in such tests: There are a very few men who score higher than everyone else, and a few men who score lower than anyone else.

Problem with the article you site is there's no information about how they came up with it, or what tests they're talking about.

If you test particular micro-skills, you can see sex differences, but they are in type of skill.

For instance, if you give tests such as "You have 30 seconds to name as many synonyms as you can for the word 'dependent'." or "words that start with l" women tend to score higher.

But I keep coming back to the fact this is an average (which says nothing about individuals, and is not documented or explained), and the weeny little difference of 5 points -- heck, one person taking IQ tests over time is going to vary more than that.

Answer 5

It is possible that the test you cited is written in a biased way.
It seems that white and East Asian men get the highest scores, while other demographics don't score as well.

Pasted from the article referenced :
"In the past, Lynn has said that men have higher IQ than women, whites higher than blacks and Eastern Asians higher than Europeans."

If you can provide additional claims to support your statement, then we might have a resonable discussion.

Besides, IQ alone is not a good measure of a person's competency in any profession or life in general. People skills are just as important as intelligence.

Answer 6

When you ask a question like the one you did, you need to back it up with facts. Women's Q's rank right up there with the males. In the old studies, since women were deterred from higher education the statistics were biased. The IQ ratio is the same. My question to you is why can't men endure as much pan as women?

Answer 7

That's not state. It might be a coincidence. I took that test and I scored 120 I don't think this is a low IQ score. Do you believe that men are smarter or something like that? If yes this way of thinking create distinctions against women and provides inequality in our communities.

Answer 8

I went to the link and read it. Men’s IQs are 3 to 4 points higher than a woman’s. Big deal? Ever think it is the Test.


What I thought was interesting is on the second page of the article.

It says they (women) tend to work harder.

“Women with the same IQ as men achieve more "possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work,"”

Guess that would put an end to the argument by some men on this site that think women don’t work as hard as men.

To thetrave… To bad you only have enough blood to run one brain at a time.

Answer 9

Quoting one study about IQ scores is like saying since men have bigger heads, they must have bigger brains and therefore must be smarter than women (that was a scientific claim made in the past as well).

Answer 10

Men might be technically 5 measly points smarter than women, but women multi-task better than men. Which in the long run is more effective.

Answer 11

Men, on average, recieve better education then women. Also, some women cannot complete their education because they become pregnant or decide to quit school and get married. Society also conditions women to think that they are not as capable as men and are often discouraged from pursuing advanced education. Poverty and social class also have an effect on who recieves an education and since men have most of the money and power, it is easier for them to pursue higher learning.

Ignoring the social structure paradigm above, most tests indicate that men and women have the same levels of intelligence, but that intelligence manifests in different ways.

From the first link provided:

"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of or connections between these processing centers.

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."