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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."
IQ is more a measure of your 'working' memory and capacity to quickly understand new topics, it doesn't necessarily to what a person would call 'intelligent'. Allegedly GWBush was has a fairly high IQ (well at least 120+) yet, outwardly at least, he may not seem it.
Being intelligent is different than acting intelligently. Women definitely play down their intelligence, and men let them. Which causes all kinds of havoc like when the women's movement decides that it's OK to not include non-monetary income so that they can claim discrimination or can suggest that equality means that in the more esoteric and technically advanced fields it needs to be 50%. Even if the total degree count ends with them getting twice as many. And pay no attention to the changes in education that "fix" the inequality problem by creating a new inequality that's facing the other way.
Or that despite having more votes than men, it's somehow men's fault that we haven't had a female President and few female Senators. Subscribing to a lower set of standards is convenient when demanding reparations, but it's not the way to actually earn any sort of meaningful respect. What happened to women a century back and earlier has precisely nothing to do with the present day.
Women aren't stupid, but there's a shocking lack of interest in actually using any of it.
That intelligence != knowledge
I prefer ignorant != stupid. Ignorance can be fixed by gaining knowledge or understanding. Stupid is the inability to learn.
Not at all, when men's issues are taken as seriously as women's are in the US, then you can call it a glib interpretation.
Try finding room at a shelter if you're a man that's been abused in general, especially so if the abuser is a woman. Or having to wait in line after the women have had their shot at the local homeless shelter. Good luck getting the police to protect you from an abusive woman. Or how mysteriously 1/5 of boys being sexually abused is conveniently rounded to virtually nothing when 1/3 of girls being molested is rounded up to most. Here's a hint those numbers are probably almost identical, women just don't admit that that happens to men as well.
It's really easy to claim that women are getting an unfair deal when you write off all the things which men have to put up with. Men are subject to conscription when there's a draft, women aren't. Men don't get any say in how a pregnancy turns out, but are still required to pay up in full, even in cases where the woman intentionally got herself pregnant. Including a shockingly common occurrence for her to stick him with the tab fore somebody else's kid.
The bias isn't going to go away until, women as a group decide to grow up and take responsibility for the crap they do to men. Men have taken much more responsibility for what they've done than what women have. Blaming men for things like female insecurity over looks, is just bigoted, that's not something that has anything at all to do with men, that's something that women do to each other.
Nearly the entirety of biological evidence is against it being an artifact of culture.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"14th-century gender roles"
Mankind didn't evolve in the 14th century. Mankind evolved over millions of years. Feminists, today, are trying to redefine what men and women are. They blame culture for all the differences between men and women. But, various drugs have measurable different effects on males and females. Similar experiences in sports have vastly different results on their bodies. No matter how much some would like to pretend that there is no difference between men and women, it remains a fallacy.
As for intelligence - I've read many an article over the years, both before and after the advent of the internet. More women's intelligence are closer to the center of any scale, while more men are found at the far ends of any scale. Meaning, an idiot is more likely to be a male, and a genius is more likely to be a male.
Granted, IQ tests reflect whatever the authors consider to be important. Design a test that places greater importance on remembering actor's names, recognizing colors, remembering details of friend's and family's vital details, women will almost ALWAYS score higher than men. Design a test that places greater importance on spatial recognition, mechanical skills, and computing RBI's and such, men will almost ALWAYS score higher.
Gender roles? Since we've spent millions of years LEARNING our gender roles, I see nothing wrong with them. They work. They have ensured the survival of our species all this time.
Go ahead - mess with the roles, and teach the kids new ways. Tell the little girls that they don't have to be little girls, and little boys don't have to grow up to be men.
Has anyone noticed that the most "modern", "advance", "civilized", and "liberal" nations in the world have a decreasing fertility rate, while the barbarians continue to breed? Has anyone noticed the invasion of those "civilized" nations taking place all around us?
Let's wait another 100 years or so, and see how this all works out. Change those roles, and experiment, while the rest of the world retains the old roles. Don't be at all surprised if the Muslims and the Catholics inherit the world. The old fashioned roles WORK! Damn fools.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Ah the emotional intelligence argument. When a wealth women loses all of her money in a scam job I would just love to ask her "It's a shame you lost all your money but how did you *feel* about the transaction?!?". Why do we give equal weight to so called emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence will not put food on the table, cure cancer, build bridges, etc. Clearly it's a lot less valuable.
As a warmish rather than hot chick, I think, in general, that the smarter the man the more he values intelligence. Or that's what I keep telling myself, anyway.
He presents it as a paradox that, on the average, people believe that their mothers were less intelligent than their fathers, and their grandmothers less intelligent than their grandfathers.
However, it is no paradox for men to be more intelligent than the women they marry (on the average), even though men and women have the same average intelligence. This merely requires that women tend to marry men more intelligent than they are, while men tend to marry women less intelligent than they are.
Of course, this give problems at each end of the scale-- men at the low-intelligence end of the scale and women at the high intelligence end of the scale both will tend to be unmarried. I'm not sure that this isn't the case, though!)
(Actualy, since the survey was of the children, not the actual couples, the statistics quoted will still be reasonable if, on the average, when a higher-intelligence women marries a lower-intelligence man they have fewer children than when a lower-intelligence woman marries a higher-intelligence man.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Emotional intelligence certainly can put food on the table. There are a number of high-paying jobs that rely primarily on relational finesse and emotional manipulation. Marketing/advertising, counseling, business management, negotiation, etc...
Further, emotional intelligence does other useful things such as bringing about peace between individuals, families, or even nations. While men at large would default to settle disputes through violent means, women would do it peacefully by default. This also means women do well at solidifying familial ties and promoting cooperation in communities, which is why it is now very well known that the best way to help a poor developing country is to give women what they need to be successful, as opposed to what the male leaders would request.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
These kinds of articles are always just troll bait. We now live in a male bashing society that is constantly trying to show how men are not really smart, and that women are really the smart ones. I suppose that we can say that this one isn't so bad because at least it claims we are women's peers. While there very well may be an intelligence difference between men and women, there is enough environmental difference that one is unlikely to be able to find it even with the best of tests.
The biggest factor is that if you take any group of people and split them into two groups. One gets taught that they don't have to provide for themselves, so anything they accomplish is just for their own gratification, and the other is taught that no one is ever going to hand them a free lunch, so they better figure out how they will support themselves, I think we can all figure out which group is going to end up smarter.
It is made abundantly clear to very small children that men need to earn their livings, and women earn a living if they want to. Even in today's society, little girls are informed that they can marry/sleep their way into being supported. No doubt, there will be a certain percentage of people that will end up dumb even if they believe they will need to support themselves, and some people will end up smart even if they don't NEED to be. The reason that it appears that there are more smart men then women isn't because women are not given credit. It isn't because evil men keep them down. It is because the group of smart women consist of the women that WANT to be smart, and the group of smart men include the men that WANT to be smart combined with the group of men that feel they NEED to be smart for survival. It should be no surprise that you get better results from the group that needs it for survival.
If women want to become men's intellectual peers, they need to start sleeping with men for their looks instead of their wallets. They need to make sure that starting at a young age, little girls are taught that they should pay for everything when they date men. Both young boys and young girls need to be taught that it is a woman's responsibility to financially support men, and that if a man supports them financially, the woman is a bum, and unworthy of being in a relationship.
Get these ideas instilled in our youth, and you will see more smart women and fewer smart men.
I don't think he was making it out to be some sort of conspiracy. I think the finger he was leveling was more along the lines of "well, according to women none of these things ever happen".
He has a point. I recently read a lengthy article discussing the supposed "gender gap", where about 15 years ago a feminist group purchased a "study" claiming that girls were falling behind in American education - when in fact the opposite was true; girls did better in school, were happier, and more likely to go to college even then. After all the resulting chaos, that is even more true than it was - and still, women are somehow the repressed ones.
I digress, but it illustrates my point. We forced the president of Harvard to resign because he suggested that women and men were better at different things. God forbid a man attempts do say damn near anything that even timidly suggests a weakness of women - yet the very same women who would destroy that man can't seem to shut up about how men destroy the world.
There's a lack of women in engineering! Oh noes! Let's push them into it. But there's also a lack of male nurses and lawyers, and nobody seems too fussed.
IOW, there's a lot of blame for women as well. A man, let alone politician, can hardly suggest that boys/men need any help because he'd get eaten alive for "ignoring the multitude of problems women in America face everyday" or something.
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"Ripped from the headlines" example. - Tiger Woods and his wife Elin. If there roles had been reversed, if Elin had been the one with the cuts and bruises on her face, and Tiger the one swinging the club, he would have been arrested and charged just like Chris Brown was. So can somebody tell us why she isn't out on bail awaiting trial right now?