So now we know. Women’s IQ is, on average, five points less than men’s. That is the conclusion of two researchers’ summaries of 57 academic studies on gender and intelligence in the British Journal of Psychology in November. Book your copies now for debating this exciting topic at those dinner parties where people get worked up about that sort of thing.
Actually, don’t bother. All you need to know for pop psychology purposes is that Professor Richard Lynn and Dr Paul Irwing have found that there are three men to each woman with an IQ of more than 130 and 5.5 men for each woman with an IQ above 145. Oh, and the difference between the sexes really opens up only after the age of 14.
Frankly — and there are no secrets between us, dear reader — I haven’t a notion what an IQ of 145 means in practice. I have a dark suspicion that in any test of intelligence of this kind I would fall short of the high standards of mental acuity that would be effortlessly achieved by, say, those teenage boy geniuses who create computer viruses in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Not for the first time I find myself wondering whether the intelligence being measured is worth quite the premium that’s put on it.
As it happens, Lynn has not only established that men tend to be brighter than women, he has also controversially discovered that Europeans have a higher IQ than the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. And — lest you were working up a liberal ecstasy of embarrassment about it — he also found that the oriental peoples of east Asia have higher average intelligence by five IQ points than Europeans. So there.
Faced with scholarship of this nature, I tend to take refuge in G K Chesterton’s brilliant little novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which a deposed president of Nicaragua argues about the merits of civilisation with an advocate of the same, an English civil servant called Barker. The former president sternly inquires of Barker whether he knows the best way to lasso a wild horse. To which the civil servant replies with dignity that he never catches wild horses and suggests that he sets very little store by such barbarian dexterity.
Precisely, says the Nicaraguan. “If the bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but nobody ever says, ‘This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a bedouin to teach him’.”
The point is rather simple. It’s that it is easy to establish standards of worth by which people are found wanting without actually asking whether we are measuring the most important attribute for the business of existence. And when we set up IQ tests as the standard by which women are found inferior to men, we may indeed question whether a high IQ is all it’s cracked up to be.
The best way to catch a wild horse, incidentally, as practised in Nicaragua, is by lassoing the forefeet. Not, perhaps, a necessary skill for a professional psychologist but rather useful, I expect, for a rancher. Similarly, there may be more men than women with high IQs, but in terms of multitasking and getting their own way (emotional intelligence), I understand that women have the edge.
I once discussed this matter with a predecessor of Lynn and Irwing, a Cambridge biologist called Charles Goodhart. He told me that he had found an interesting insight into the question of why it was male undergraduates who typically got more first-class degrees than women.
In his study of fruit flies he had found that male fruit flies tend to have either lots of hairs on their bottoms or very few; female fruit flies have just middling hairy bottoms. (I hope I’ve got this right; it was a long time ago.) This illustrated the male tendency to go to extremes — the human version being that men tended to get first or third-class degrees; women tended to get seconds.
To which the obvious response was that if men did very well at one end of the spectrum, they did badly at the other. Why should we not be equally concerned with men’s failure rate and women’s remarkable ability to get perfectly respectable results? It’s at this point that the conversation tends to get bogged down in testosterone, or the male tendency to take risks as opposed to the female tendency to play safe. Let’s not go there.
Rather, let’s brood about why it is that we tend to set such store by intelligence tests and, indeed, academic achievement in general. This week school leavers are poring over those pull-outs in the newspapers giving the official lists of vacancies at British universities for everything from accommodation management to youth studies (I’m not making it up). The hopeful youths who fill these vacancies will, no doubt, be under the illusion that getting a degree will give them a head start in the business of life, since a degree is proof that you are intelligent.
Suckers all. I had a lovely time at university, as an undergraduate and graduate. If I had my time over again I’d do the same, only reading classics because it was a better class of subject than history. But in terms of the struggle for existence, I have been effortlessly outflanked by people who don’t have a degree but who are far better at getting things done, driving events forward and making money.
By all means let’s make a fuss of Mensa members and university graduates, but let’s not fool ourselves that they are any better at the skills of living or, indeed, the pursuit of happiness. Men or women — they aren’t.
- Gerry Fitt is dead. He won’t, I expect, get anything like the plaudits that were paid to Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam in death but he was, to my mind, as deserving of affection and respect as either of them.
He was a brave man and kind and modest with it. When I had friends from Ireland visiting me in London, he often went to infinite trouble to show them round parliament.
He was, moreover, a man with a heroic capacity for drink and I say this with sincerity, having never been more drunk in my life than with him.
In this I was not alone. There was the story of one of his security minders who took over the job, determined not to make the mistake of his predecessor in trying to keep pace with Gerry in doing the round of bars of an evening.
So he tipped the wink to the barman in each of the pubs he went into, telling him that for every gin and tonic consumed by the boss, he would have just the tonic. So it happened and at the end of the night the man was stone-cold sober.
Alas, the following day another security man presented himself at Lord Fitt’s door. “Where’s the other fellow?” inquired Gerry. “Quinine poisoning,” the security man replied.
India Knight is away
