Dennis Mangan shares a graph from Helmuth Nyborg’s paper, Sex-related differences in general intelligence g, brain size, and social status, which concludes that women do slightly better in verbal tests, men better on spatial, and, in sum, men have an IQ advantage over women of around 7 points, with a much wider dispersion:
The result, as the graph shows, is that at an IQ of 145, which could reasonably be deemed an elite level, men outnumber women by a factor of 8. Nyborg concludes that this must be highly significant for male dominance in “higher educational and socio-economic spheres”, such as academia, science, and business. Add the male dominance in IQ at the highest levels to the fact that men are predisposed to take more risks and work longer hours, and I’d say that the feminist case for discrimination against women vanishes.
Of course, Nyborg was dealt a “Larry Summers” for showing this.
As one commenter notes, who’s smarter in general depends on how you weight different facets of intelligence:
So according to how you weight the two sorts of results [verbal and spatial], you can conclude that men are more intelligent on average, or less. And any weighting you choose is essentially arbitrary, surely? That’s why the early IQ researchers weighted them to attribute the same mean to each sex, was it not? The discovery of different standard deviations for each sex goes back to those early researchers, doesn’t it?
I’ve been wondering for a while if “spatial intelligence” is really a major indicator of capability for abstract thought, or of huge practical value either in today’s world. If you’re going to be a mechanical engineer or a football coach, spatial intelligence matters a lot, but I doubt it matters all that much for most executive jobs, or even for typical electrical engineering or software design work.
If you consider spatial intelligence a little more broadly, you might think of it as merely the capacity to visualize and to hold large problems in your head. I think that is fairly useful pretty much across the board.