Men are the smarter sex with higher IQs than women, says study

A NEW claim that men are more intelligent than women is poised to reignite controversy about the difference between the sexes.

Research to be published later this year argues that men’s IQs are on average five points higher than those of women.

The scientists who conducted the study say this is why men are more likely to win Nobel prizes and gain other major academic distinctions.

One of them is Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, whose work on intelligence has already proved highly controversial.

Not only has hemaintained that men have higher IQs than women, but also that whites are more intelligent than blacks and eastern Asians brighter than Europeans.

The new work, to appear in the British Journal of Psychology on November 4, was conducted with Dr Paul Irwing, senior lecturer in organisational psychology at the University of Manchester.

The British Psychological Society, which owns the journal, will not release details of the study until publication.

But Dr Irwing told the Times Higher Education Supplement he and Prof Lynn had found strong evidence that men not only had larger brains than women but higher IQs by about five points.

“My politics are rather different from Richard’s and from my point of view, I would prefer it if we were wrong,” he said.

However he had resolved to put “scientific truth” above personal political conflicts, and potentially even his academic reputation.

The paper will argue that the IQ difference between men and women cannot be easily dismissed as insignificant.

Looked at from a population perspective, it meant there were three men to each woman with an IQ above 130, and 5.5 men for each woman with an IQ above 145.

Dr Irwing told the Times Higher Education Supplement: “These different proportions of men and women with high IQ scores are clearly worth speaking of and may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such as chess grandmasters, fields medallists for mathematics, Nobel prizewinners and the like.”

The researchers acknowledge that women now outnumber men at every level of educational achievement, with the sole exception of Phd level.

They also conclude that the IQ difference cannot on its own explain gender inequalities in the workplace, where men still greatly outnumber women at the highest ranks of management.

The study says there is evidence that at the same IQ level women are able to achieve more than men “possibly because they are more conscientious and better adapted to sustained periods of hard work”.

A previous study found that IQs of about 125 were enough to allow access to all levels in the labour market.

“The small male advantage in IQ is therefore likely to be of most significance for tasks of high complexity, such as complex problem solving in mathematics, engineering and physics, and in other areas of high spatial ability,” said Dr Irwing.