Society vs. Biology. Which is it? Here’s the truth:
Men are more often highly intelligent than women. Now that is a hard pill to swallow. Have all these misogynists been right all the time? Well, back in the 90s, they were right when they said men were more intelligent than women, or as a study from 1994 liked to phrase it:
‘’Among adults, males have slightly higher verbal and reasoning abilities than females and a more pronounced superiority in spatial abilities. If the three abilities are combined to form general intelligence, the mean for males is 4 IQ points higher than the mean for females. Among children up to the age of around 14 yr, the sex differences are smaller because girls mature earlier than boys. The evolutionary selection pressures responsible for greater intelligence in males are discussed’’.
Now, before the male readers get too happy, I will have to tell you that a lot has changed since then. Look at these two bell curves.
What we see is that men have a wider range of IQ, they are more striking.
First of all, one thing this chart implies is that women, on average, have a little higher IQ than men. The intelligence researcher James Flynn stated back in 2012 that women’s IQs are climbing at a faster rate than men’s IQs.
Looking at the bell curves, some say that women are slightly smarter on average, while men are more likely to be extremely smart or stupid. There are just more men who can be considered geniuses than women, but similarly, there are more men with a very low IQ than women. Women also became better at math, yet studies coherently suggest that men and women differ in cognitive abilities. Men are stronger in visual thinking and women in language. So, that stereotype might be true after all.
Now two interesting things are here. On one hand, it appears social factors like access to education, motivation, promotion, and just the change of time have a large impact on the results of social studies, especially regarding gender studies. On the other hand, we observe even after five centuries of the women’s rights movement that men are more striking in intelligence on both sides of the spectrum, and this allows speculation of biological reasons for this phenomenon as well. One speculation is that chromosomes might play a role in this. The X chromosome is an important piece of our genetics that influences our mental abilities. When the X chromosome mutates, then this might lead to significant changes in average mental abilities. Now women have a second X chromosome (XX), if one mutates, while men only have one (XY). This might lead to both superintelligence and mental disability.
That was a lot of data. But this is what I want you to think about. Why are men so much more striking than women? Let’s get away from IQ and look at other statistics. We know men are still more dominant in high-earning jobs; they are more often billionaires, entrepreneurs, successful engineers, and top scientists. They are the winners of society, the absolute winners. Now, similarly, men are just the biggest losers in society. The Federal Bureau of Prisons of the United States published this data on Saturday, 25 June 2022: 93,2% of prison inmates are men. Men are more often violent, they are more often rapists; they have more often pedophilia and they suffer more from homelessness, poverty, and street violence. Men also commit suicide three times as much as women (even though that is a more complex topic that I will write about at another time).
Well, here’s what most people do when they hear such data: They cherry-pick. If you are an anti-feminist, you might talk about how men do greater services for society, how men are victims and not women, and women are just boring average people. And if you are a radical feminist, you might look at the other side of the data and say men are so much eviler than women, they are the source of all our misfortune. All that isn’t quite true. Most people look at data to find support for their opinion instead of looking at data to form an opinion. However, we don’t fully understand how to evaluate the data yet because we don’t know how much is biology and how much is just societal expectations, education, and discrimination, or even just limitations in the methods for collecting the data. While we can assume that there are biological differences between men and women, we shouldn’t underestimate how much society can change the outcome of social gender studies. Most people like to read studies from 2009 and earlier. Even while researching this topic, the Google algorithm showed me the study from 1994 first, which stated that men are more intelligent than women and not the more recent studies because some people just like old narratives, and these narratives are not only against women but men too. While most people have a progressive mindset these days, we are all still guilty of subconscious prejudices. We often think women are not as intelligent as men, they are too sensitive, and they are better at being a mother than anything else. Contrary, some of us think men are all predators, rapists, and killers and we should be careful when meeting any man because he might be a serial killer. Why? Because the studies suggest a certain trend? What most people do not understand while reading the data is that men and women are more similar than different. Only when looking at extremes, there is this male dominance on both sides. For example, on average men are not significantly more aggressive than women, yet the most violent crimes are being committed by men.
Moreover, we cannot deny issues such as that we reward women more for beauty rather than scientific performance and having a distinguished career. Did you know that Marilyn Monroe, for instance, had a higher IQ than Einstein? And what is she famous for? Her beauty. Is it that women maybe just don’t receive enough attention? Diagnosing women with autism is also harder, for instance, than diagnosing boys with autism because male autism is more striking. Is it that women are as evil as men but again do not get the same attention? Evil women tend to lie and defame people, gossip, and emotionally abuse others. Most of the time women abuse other women while men abuse other men, but we know that intersexually we also abuse each other differently. So maybe all that is because women are only seen for their beauty and nothing else. Not their talents, not their evil, nor their difficulties. Moreover, perhaps women don’t push as hard for greatness as men do due to societal expectations and a different reward system. This makes sense. Why should women bother to earn a lot of money, if that is not as validated as their beauty? Well, on the other hand, men are actually quite under pressure because society still tells them they have to be stronger than anyone else, and more successful in getting a woman, respect, and validation. Of course, they are going to push hard for financial success and less for beauty. Even though the rewarding systems have become more nuanced in the last decades.
A lot of stereotypes in social science turned out to be not exactly true. One other narrative is, for instance, that women are less competitive than men, but recent studies show that this is very task-specific and regarding beauty. Women are actually very competitive. Women are also not more cooperative, that’s too easy. Studies show that men are again just more extreme, they are either the most selfish or the most altruistic people while women just on average cooperate to benefit everyone. All this shows that things are more complex and that maybe if we manipulate certain social factors, we could see more women being extraordinary in science and in the free market and similarly observe more evil women. Perhaps we end up seeing women as more talented and special than we do now and similarly, we might see them as more dangerous than we do now.
Maybe the question that remains for you is why is all that so important to me and others. Well, three reasons:
- No one wants to be judged by stereotypes. A man does not want to be judged as being a threat just because he happens to be a man. A woman who strives to be great does not want to be treated differently because people have a picture of a woman in their head that does not fit greatness and science. The subconscious stereotypes we have about both genders and that we partly want to legitimize with data that only show relevant differences in the extremes anyway, enforce injustice for both parties. We still disadvantage women when they are pursuing a career because of prejudices (along with motherhood) and earn less while doing the same job. Men, however, are disadvantaged in the justice system and end up having much harder sentences than women for the same crimes. People like me are not anti-scientific, in fact, I am a scientist myself. People like me (you could call me a rational feminist) are skeptical and they know what harm these stereotypes inflict on others and that is why they have to fight against the black-and-white thinking and the cherry-picking of data. In the end, the data might change greatly in ten years as the studies regarding women’s IQ have shown. Back in the 90s, many scientists were convinced that men’s superiority was a genetic cause, and I showed that this turned out to be false. As long as we can’t prove a biological causality for the results of certain social studies, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume.
- Another reason people like me care about gender differences and social studies is that typical female traits like empathy are less validated than typical male traits like rationality and ‘’dominance’’. Women are most often not considered talented, and lovely, but useless, weak, and too emotional. Centuries of discrimination against women will show their effects even after five centuries of the women’s rights movement. Women have never been validated for anything. Not even motherhood. They were supposed to watch children, not even educate them. Their verbal talents and their emotional intelligence are often regarded as useless even though women have already in the past done great services by using these specific traits. But again, women did not get attention about it. What these services were and what great impact of women on history remained unnoticed is a topic for another article. We also pretty quickly correlate rationality with intelligence, suggesting men are more intelligent. More recent studies, however, claim that IQ and rationality have nothing to do with each other. Just as people with high emotional intelligence are not necessarily nicer or even more empathetic people. The misconceptions about gender and social norms are significant and partly dangerous when they are used to justify sexism.
- Finally, we talk about gender differences and discuss biological vs. societal factors because we want to change things and the only way to change things is by manipulating social factors that have led to certain results. We all want men to commit less suicide and get them away from the streets and drugs. We all want to fight back against sexual violence against women and we all want to fight back against injustice. In the long run, this means we will have to redefine our perception of masculinity and femininity. We have already achieved a lot in that regard, but there are still voices who want to push sexism that leads to a miserable society for everyone. I claim that the social factors that make women nonstriking in science are also the factors that make them nonstriking in court (the privileges of physical beauty, for instance).
But I want to ask you: How much do you trust social studies and do you think the differences between men and women are more biologically or socially affected?
Then follow me on Twitter @CulcuYildiz!
