Vol. 9, No. 8 August 19, 2005

Parade magazine, which usually arrives with the Sunday paper, is not exactly the Atlantic Monthly but occasionally tackles a thorny issue such as "Are men smarter than women?" To render a judgment, Parade commissioned a very smart woman indeed.

Marilyn Vos Savant, a Parade columnist, is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest IQ ever recorded. High IQ, of course, does not always translate to good sense, but the comments of Vos Savant seem very sensible and worthy of attention.

The average IQ of females is equal to the average IQ of males, Marilyn says. But this can be misleading because many more males score at the top and bottom of the scale, which she says could account for the greater number of men both in the sciences and in prison. But does the "gender disparity in science," which gave Harvard boss Lawrence Summers such grief, mean that men are smarter than women? That was the question that touched off this cover story. Vos Savant doesn't think so.

She finds no evidence, in fact, that the sciences attract the brightest people, a common assumption confirmed by frequent references to rocket science and such. Marilyn believes that science, like chess, does attract bright people, but "only the ones with certain personality characteristics." These traits might be more common in men, whom, she notes, pretty much have a lock on the position of dictator.

"No one thinks the paucity of women in the field of ruthless domination is because they aren't smart enough!" Well said. Meanwhile, it should not be thought unusual that smart people, including women, would flee at the sight of a microscope.

"The brightest people are spread over all sorts of other occupations," says Savant, who includes motherhood in this group. When her own children were small, she was a stay-at-home mom, "and I loved it," she says. Her husband, by the way, is Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the Jarvik-7 and Jarvik-2000 artificial hearts. Each thinks the other is smarter. They do not play chess.

Vos Savant also finds fault with professionally administered intelligence tests, which are "fine for practical purposes but not for analytical ones." Such tests must formulate a definition of intelligence, which she finds difficult, like defining beauty. The tests do a good job at measuring mental abilities, she says, but they don't measure intelligence itself.

So the answer is really no. Men are not smarter than women, something borne out by the animal world. Female chimps, gorillas, dolphins and guide dogs are all as adept as their male counterparts. There are, of course, men who are smarter than women, and vice versa. Some might say, for example, that Thomas Sowell is smarter than Oprah Winfrey. On the other hand, the case could be made that Margaret Thatcher and Condolezza Rice are smarter than Howard Dean and Howard Stern. Everyone will have comparisons of their own.

One hopes that the militant feminist inquisitors who have made life difficult for Lawrence Summers, as this column has noted, will pay heed to the views of Marilyn Vos Savant. Numerical disparities are the rule, not the exception, in life. Such disparities, even in places such as science faculties, do not mean that men are smarter then women. Neither do they mean that gender discrimination is necessarily at work, and that the federal government must step in with gender quotas.

Other factors are involved, such as personal differences, effort, and choice. For example, the woman with the highest recorded IQ once chose to stay at home with her children rather than work on a science faculty. Later she chose to be a writer. For its part, Parade has provided a better treatment of the "who is smarter?" question than one would expect to find in some academic journal.

Sally Pipes
is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute
for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.