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How Men and Women Badly Estimate Their Own Intelligence
theodp writes "In investigating the question of whether men are smarter than women, British researcher Adrian Furnham came up with some startling results. His analysis of some 30 studies showed that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ, but women underestimate their own intelligence while men overestimate theirs. Surprisingly, both men and women perceived men being smarter across generations — both sexes believe that their fathers are smarter than their mothers and their grandfathers are more intelligent than their grandmothers. And if there are children, both men and women think their sons are brighter than their daughters."
Actually he does - it's in the linked article, on the first page:
"Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men."
Of course, IQ does a remarkably good job at what it's intended to do: correlate with the sort of things we normally associate with intelligence, in the context of a statistical study. Sure, there are plenty of people who seem stupid in some ways but have high IQ; on average, though, it works well.
This is yet another case of people who know what IQ is actually supposed to be used for using it that way, and then the uninformed public complaining that it doesn't perfectly match something else.
Did you have some alternate metric that this study could have used in place of IQ that would do a better job?
^ Deary, I.J.; Irwing, P.; Der, G; Bates, T.C. (2005). "Brother-sister differences in the g factor in intelligence: Analysis of full, opposite-sex siblings from the NLSY1979". Intelligence 35:451-456.
There you go, have a citation for male IQ results having a higher variance than female.
What, you want an online ref? Here's one about math tests
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121691806472381521.html
The neurological basis appears to be that males have more pruning during the final stages of brain formation. This can result in more efficient pathways, but has less redundancy.