The Natural Superiority of Women (38 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

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At the school ages, but not in the preschool age range, boys do better than girls on spatial and mechanical-aptitude tests.

 

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But a cultural factor is suspected as operative here, because boys do no better than girls in the preschool years on such tests, and it seems obvious that they depend upon the special kind of information that helps them in these tests and that is not culturally offered to or encouraged in girls. Furthermore, boys do much better in these tests than they do in the more abstract tests of spatial relations, upon which both sexes may be equally uninformed.
Boys are found to do better than girls on block counting from pictures, directional orientation, plan of search, tests of form boards, puzzle boxes, assembling objects, pencil-and-paper mazes, mechanical comprehension, arithmetic problems and arithmetic reasoning, ingenuity, and induction.
On the Army Alpha tests boys excel significantly in only three tests: arithmetic reasoning, number-series completion, and information. In arithmetic computation girls do better than boys, but they do not do as well as boys in solving arithmetic problems and in arithmetic reasoning.
As far as intelligence scores and other indications of what we call intelligence go, the conclusion is clear: Girls, on the whole, do better than boys on whatever it is that the intelligence tests and other tests "measure." The only things in which boys do better than girls are mathematics, arithmetical reasoning, and mechanical and spatial aptitudes; and the evidence indicates that cultural factors play a significant role in assisting boys to make a better showing in these areas of knowledgefor it is largely upon knowledge that, it is suspected, the superior achievement of boys, on the average, is based. That this is so is indicated by the girls' increasingly doing as well as boys on those tests in which boys ritually excelled.
It is well established that females start developing
in utero
at a more rapid rate than males and that this acceleration in the rate of growth is maintained by the female throughout childhood and up to the age of seventeen and a half years. It has been suggested that the acceleration in physical growth in girls is also accompanied by an intellectual acceleration, in which case boys and girls of the same chronological age cannot be compared with one another. It would be necessary to make the comparison on the basis of psychological or developmental age rather than chronological age. But such a procedure would seriously distort

 

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the results obtained by giving the boys an advantage of anything from a year to almost two years in training and general environmental experience. The fact is that intellectual acceleration in girls has not been directly demonstrated, and all that we know about the relationship between physical and mental factors is against the influence of physical maturation on intellectual development. Intellectual development is obviously far more dependent upon kind and quality of environmental stimulation than it is upon slight differences in physical development. And this is the critical point: What the intelligence tests measure is to a large or an appreciable extent the response that a particular person with a unique history has made to the environment in which she or he has been conditioned, the response made through the alembic of the individual's special history of experience to the test designed to measure "intelligence."
It should, then, be obvious, that before one can pass judgment on the intelligence of one group as compared with another it is necessary to afford that group equal opportunities for the development of intelligence. It need not be reiterated here that boys and girls do not enjoy equal opportunities for the development of intelligence. Boys and girls live in different social environments, different achievements are expected of them, and they are called upon to play very different roles from earliest childhood. If girls do not have opportunities equal to boys' for the development of intelligence, neither do boys have opportunities equal to girls' for the development of intelligence. Each sex has different kinds of opportunities; these different kinds of opportunities are not comparable. Hence it is, under the circumstances, impossible to answer the question of the biological quality and development of the intelligence of the sexes, because the biological potentials for the development of intelligence have been so markedly and differentially influenced by the constant operation of factors of a social nature based on differences in the cultural attitudes toward the sexes.
One thing, however, is strikingly and significantly clear, and that is that intelligence, as it is defined and expected of each sex, is, on the average, something in which females of preschool and school age do better than males, with the exception of the mechanical, spatial, and mathematical reasoning tests. This does

 

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not necessarily make girls superior in intelligence to boys, but it does make them superior to boys in terms of what the intelligence tests measure, with the exceptions named. In other words, where the opportunities are afforded them and where they receive the necessary encouragements, girls generally do better than boys. Where boys receive the more favorable environmental stimulations and encouragements, they do better than girls. The evidence strongly suggests that if boys and girls received equal environmental stimulations and encouragements, they would do at least equally well on whatever the intelligence tests set out to measure.
In short, the age-old myth that females are of inferior intelligence to men has, so far as the scientific evidence goes, not a leg to stand upon. Indeed, by present tests and standards of measurement girls, on the whole, do better than boys. At school they make better adjustments to conditions than boys and better satisfy the requirements of the definitions offered at the commencement of this chapter than boys do. The conclusion cannot be avoided that girls of school age are, on the whole, more intelligent than boys of school age. The fact is, whatever it may mean, that on entering school at the age of five years the average girl's mental age is two years ahead of that of the average boy!
Thus far our discussion has been focused largely on the intelligence of preschool children and children of school age because most of the intelligence tests have been carried out with children and are both revealing and important. What now of the intelligence of adults? Here the wise and thoroughly considered words of Stoddard may be quoted:
It is futile to attempt a thorough exploration of sex differences in the later ages, in terms of the contents of present-day group or individual tests. In future, having defined intelligence with a heavy saturation in the abstract, having prepared tests with high ceilings, and with full reach to complexity and originality, all in total disregard of any found or estimated differences between the sexes, we may then apply these new tools of measurements to the sex problems indicated.

8

However, such tests have not yet been devised, and until they have been I think most of us will agree with Stoddard that it is futile to compare the intelligence of the sexes,
on the basis of

 

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present-day intelligence tests,
with the expectation of learning anything about the fundamental nature of the genetic basis of the intelligence of either sex. Such tests as have been made on adultsand there have been manyparallel the findings that have been made on schoolchildren. The same holds true for males and females at college.
Even so, the tests tell us quite a number of things: They tell us, for example, that there is no evidence to suggest that the female adolescent and adult are genetically inferior in intelligence to the male; they tell us that the factor of social experience is a major one in influencing the development of intelligence, for most females in their middle teens begin to evidence an increasing preoccupation with matters that are not measured by the usual tests, and tend to become less and less interested in the content of such tests. It is at this stage that the boys begin to pull ahead on the tests; and it is at this stage that most girls begin to think seriously of marriage, while boys begin to think in terms of earning a living. The one prepares for the requirements of a wife, the other for the expected requirements of a breadwinner. At this point in their lives the goals and aspirations of most boys and girls are utterly different, though they are directed toward similar ends. When, therefore, the average male ends up with more information at marriage than the female at marriageable age, it is highly probable that this does not mean, as it is frequently said to mean, that the female stops growing mentally at eighteen while the male continues to grow, and that this difference is due to a genetic difference between the sexes. Rather it means that while the male goes on acquiring the experience and information that intelligence tests are alleged to measure, the female turns to more domestic interests that the tests do not measure.
Girls in high school and in college frequently discover the disadvantages of being ''brains." Many boys tend to avoid such girls. Bright girls are, therefore, often reluctant to appear as bright as they really are. As the 1955 report of the Commission on the Education of Women,
How Fare American Women?,
showed, "the intelligence quotients and grades of girls in high school become lower when they consider that successful academic work militates against their popularity and femininity." The same holds true for many college girls. Summarizing the

 

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evidence, Professor Howard Moss, in his book
Comparative Psychology
(1946), wrote: "In human beings, it has appeared to be a universal fact that, other things being equal, there is a negligible difference between males and females in cognitive capacities. And the findings in subhuman species have been similar." If anything, the difference is in favor of the female.
As John Gibson has remarked, "Trying to evaluate the overall intelligence of the sexes with the standard IQ tests is a little like trying to measure a ball of mercury with a yardstick."

9
Hence, more oblique approaches to the solution of this problem have been attempted. Humor, it has been determined, is a remarkably accurate index of intelligence. With this in mind psychologists at Wesleyan University and at Smith College investigated several hundred men and women from both institutions. They were exposed to extremely funny to utterly pointless jokes. The results were very illuminating. The men found all the jokes much funnier than the women did, and gave them higher ratings. The women showed far greater discrimination. They were unamused by the poorer jokes, but rated the really funny ones higher than the men did. In view of the high correlation between a sense of humor and high intelligence the women in these tests scored considerably higher than the men.

Studies carried out at both Duke University and at the University of London uniformly agree that women are far better judges of character than menyet another evidence of women's higher problem-solving abilities. Indeed, as Henry James remarked in his story
In the Cage,
"The cleverness of men ends where the cleverness of women begins."
With marriage and children, women continue to grow in intelligence; especially in the kind of intelligence that is of the greatest importance for the survival of the human species, the intelligence of the heart, I think it can be shown that women far outdistance men. The one field in which it has long been established that males do better than females is mathematics, but here, too, recent studies have unequivocally shown the double-bind situation in which girls normally find themselves. They receive mixed messageson the one hand to be career women and on the other to be wives and mothers, or to devote themselves single-mindedly to a demanding subject like mathematics. Added to this are the effects of the self-fulfilling

 

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