Rise in women’s IQs related to nurture, meeting life’s challenges

Postmedia News 


Women have always lagged behind men on IQ tests. Not any more. James Flynn, the researcher famous for discovering that IQ results have been improving over time, says women have been improving faster, and have caught up.

Flynn’s research has yet to be published but The Telegraph and other news outlets around the world reported on it Monday. In his samples, taken from several countries including Canada, women equalled or surpassed men.

This ought to do more than spark silly debates about who can finish the crossword first. It challenges the idea that if a personality trait shows up more in one gender than the other, that’s proof that the characteristic must be determined solely by biological sex differences, and is therefore innate and immutable.

Imagine it’s 1960, and women still perform worse than men on intelligence tests. I might argue that there should be equal numbers of male and female doctors. You’d argue: but there aren’t as many smart women as there are smart men, so it follows that there shouldn’t be as many female doctors. It’s just the way it is. Can’t argue with biology.

And I might argue, well, what if more women became doctors? Then they’d get smarter! At which point I’d be dismissed as a stupid woman.

Few people argue, these days, that women shouldn’t be doctors. But the idea persists that group differences are biological, therefore innate, therefore immutable. I hear it on the playground, all the time.

We parents tend to assume — maybe to stave off guilt — that we raise our kids in laboratory conditions. So when Johnny picks up a truck or Suzy picks up a doll, we chuckle about how we used to think gender was socially created, before we had kids, but now we know better. It must be 100 per cent innate, because heaven knows we enlightened modern parents haven’t done anything to influence our kids’ behaviour.

Of course, nature does seem to account for a fair bit of who we are. But nurture starts in the womb, and it’s a lot more subtle and pervasive than we non-neuroscientists realize. Lise Eliot, in her book Pink Brain Blue Brain, refers to a startling study that asked mothers of 11-month-olds to set the angle of a slope for their babies to crawl. While the girl and boy babies had the same crawling ability, the mothers of girls significantly underestimated what their babies could handle.

People adapt to the challenges they’re given, and the expectations they have to meet. If you never let your daughter find her own way anywhere, it’s no shock if she grows up to be timid or bad with maps.

I comment frequently on the fact that newspapers receive fewer submissions of opinion articles from women than from men. Every time I do, I get responses along the lines of, “Maybe women just aren’t as interested in writing opinion. Maybe women and men are different.”

Well, yeah. Women and men are different. But the question that interests me is: Can we, as a society and over time, change the ways in which men and women are different? Flynn’s findings suggest we can.

It’s not just that biology determines a person’s intelligence, which then influences her life circumstances. It goes the other way too: Her life circumstances influence her intelligence. Flynn’s latest findings suggest that when women’s roles changed, over the course of the 20th century, their brains changed too.

The notion that group membership influences individual traits is unsettling, for a few reasons. One is that we treat group membership as an unacceptable basis for discrimination, while encouraging discrimination on the basis of traits such as intelligence. I’m not arguing against that. But if one gender is, on the whole, less intelligent than the other, it follows that the outcomes will be skewed even if no one discriminates on the basis of gender. Or, if one gender is more assertive, that gender is likely to be the one that dominates in newspapers and politics.

I don’t think the answer is to create two sets of standards for university enrolment or hiring — or newspaper opinion pages. But it makes sense to ask why the members of a group are underperforming in any area, and whether that can be changed.

The changing results on IQ tests — as flawed a measurement of intelligence as that might be — is a reminder that the traits we use to define ourselves as individuals might be, at least in part, socially created. We should be very careful about assuming that anything is ordained. And it’s stupid to assume we know everything there is to know about the respective capabilities of women and men.