The gender war has a new winner for the first time in 100 years. With women having been as much as five points behind men since IQ testing began a century ago, psychologists have recently discovered that female IQ scores have risen above men’s.
The findings were uncovered by James Flynn, who said that women’s increase could be attributed to their multitasking skills.
In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster. This is a consequence of modernity.
The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ. The full effect of modernity on women is only just emerging.
According to some scientists, women have an ability to multitask, juggling raising a family and going to work. Another theory for the increase is that women are realizing that they have higher potential intelligence than men.
Flynn’s findings will be published in his new book. However, Flynn said he needs more data to explain the trend because there are consistent differences between gender and race.
In the 1980s, the “Flynn Effect” showed that IQs in western countries increased by three points each decade. It also showed IQ was not genetic and could be improved.
Flynn, Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, collected IQ tests from countries in western Europe and from America, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina and Estonia.
The results showed that the gap between men and women has become insignificant in westernized countries.
In Australia, male and female IQs were found to be almost identical while in New Zealand, Estonia and Argentina, women scored marginally more than men.
As the world gets more complex, and living in it demands more abstract thought, so people are adapting. This improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were more disadvantaged in the past.
In addition, a five-month online contest conducted two years ago concluded that women are most clever than men.
The competition was hosted in nine languages and was based on the board game Trivial Pursuit. Over 15 million questions were asked.
Women answered 4,088,139 questions correctly, while men answered 4,077,596 correctly.
Source: Elite.
