Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man? By Toby Young.
A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It’s the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female). …
For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of “Intelligence: All That Matters,” found that men’s brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women’s brains, on average, have thicker cortices. ‘The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,’ they write. This is not a new finding — it has been known for some time that the total volume of men’s brains is, in general, larger than that of women’s, even when adjusted for men’s larger average body size — but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes.
Does this paper have any implications when it comes to men and women’s intellectual abilities? The answer is yes, but they’re not clear cut.
On the one hand, feminists won’t like this confirmation that men, on average, have bigger brains than women because there’s a well-established connection between total brain volume and IQ. …
There’s some evidence linking intelligence with the thickness of the cerebral cortex. … However, this finding is less robust than the link between total brain volume and IQ, with some studies failing to replicate it and others both replicating it and seeming to contradict it at the same time. …
Oops, now the big one that the PC mob simply will not countenance:
Back in 2017, before his paper had been peer-reviewed, Ritchie was keener to talk about another of his team’s findings, namely, that the male brains they studied were, on most measures, more variable than the female ones. He was excited about the fact that this discovery complemented a 2008 study of male-female IQ differences, also carried out by a team from Edinburgh, which found only negligible differences in the mean scores of men and women on intelligence tests, but that men outnumbered women at either end of the cognitive bell curve. So greater variability among men when it comes to cognitive ability. That was also the conclusion of a 2007 paper which found that among those scoring in the top two per cent of the Armed Forces Qualification Test, men outnumbered women by a ratio of 2:1.
Ritchie and his co-authors note that this finding has been replicated many times — ‘almost universally’ is the phrase they use — but that doesn’t mean it’s universally accepted. Far from it. When Lawrence Summers, then the President of Harvard, suggested that the higher preponderance of men on the right-hand tail of the IQ distribution curve might help to explain why there are more male than female professors in the maths and sciences at top universities, he was rounded on by almost the entire liberal establishment. Distinguished Harvard alumni withheld donations, the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences passed a motion of no confidence in him and he was forced to apologise – over and over again – like a supplicant at a Chinese show trial. In the end, he had no choice but to tender his resignation. This controversy is thought to be the reason he didn’t get the job of Treasury Secretary in the first Obama administration. …
He wasn’t claiming that all men are cleverer than women, or that the average man is brighter than the average woman, or that the most able women aren’t as intelligent as the most gifted men — although many of his critics understood him to be saying those things, or at least pretended to so they could justify how outraged they were. All he was saying is that the greater variability of men’s IQ — at both tails of the distribution curve — might be rooted in genetic differences between the sexes. …
Reality blows up a whole ideology:
If you allow that genetic differences may be a factor, then parity between men and women when it comes to intellectual eminence won’t easily be achieved. Just levelling the playing field — eliminating gender stereotypes, sexual discrimination, implicit bias, and so on — won’t be enough. …
The difficulty this evidence presents is not for believers in equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. The differences between men and women are such that gender parity in STEM fields, particularly at the top of those professions, is unlikely to be achieved without some highly intrusive state interventions.
The distribution of g [raw intelligence] in male and female populations. The scale of the horizontal axis is in units of the male standard deviation.
The standard solution to this reality throughout the PC West when white men dominate on merit has been to dilute the effect of merit down and down until ideological outcomes are achieved. Then they wonder why nobody seems to be as competent as they used to be — for example, NASA got to the moon on slide rule technology and white men, but now does not even have any rockets and goes nowhere.
