Men are smartest and dumbest of the two genders
Rushda:
September 23rd, 2007
The long debate over who is the smartest of the sexest is now bringing more results - but confusing ones. Psychologists have recently maintained that because twice as many men win Nobel prizes compared to women, there are more men in the brightest 2% of the population. However, even though men win more prizes, the study has also shown that there are more men at the opposite extreme as well - with the least intelligent 2% of the population having many more men than women.
It is a sensitive matter and making any sweeping judgements is difficult, with people such as Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, even losing his job last year when he maintained that men were more intelligent. Any studies have always been flawed because of so many varying factors - culture, social status, unequal opportunities, and the sheer range in human intelligence in the first place.
The new studies by British psychologists (though disturbingly all men) are believed to be the closest we have got to settling the debate once and for all. The psychologists conducted tests on 2,500 brothers and sisters in order to rule out family background. It was found that women scored higher on language skills whilst men were the best on sciences and arithmetic. Whilst the average intelligence was found to be roughly equal, it was found that men were more likely to be at extremes on the scale. As Timothy Bates, a psychology professor at Edinburgh University, says:
“Men were more likely to be both at the very top and at the very bottom.”
Various evolutionary explanations have been given for women maintaining a comfortable middle ground whilst men like to excel to be more attractive to women. However, many still remain unconvinced by such explanations - after all, you could account for almost any results in this way. Also, it is unclear whether testing brothers and sisters will really mean that gender is the only factor being considered - social and cultural pressure exists within families as well. Psychologists seem hell-bent on finding some tangible difference but maybe there isn’t one after all. Is it really that difficult to maintain that men and women might just be equally likely to be intelligent?