IQs are improving and women’s IQs have overtaken men’s:
Emeritus Professor James Flynn, of Otago University, whose research on intelligence has gained international recognition, says women had lagged by as many as five points behind men in IQ testing.
But the gap has been narrowing in recent years and now women’s scores are higher in some countries, including New Zealand, he is quoted as saying on various British media websites.
“In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster,” he said.
“This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.”
One explanation is that women’s lives have become more demanding as they multitask between raising a family and working outside the home. . .
We work more therefore we think better?
Homepaddock 
Great to see IQ’s raising. But it also reveals a concerning factor in our education system.
40 years ago people were concerned that girls academic achievements being behind male results. Of course, expectations for females were substantially lower. However over the years females have overhauled and gone past males. That’s great !!
Who in the past was going to be a clerical assistant,personal assistant,bank tellar,council staffer now is becoming a ceo,a head of department and even a Prime Minister.
What concerns me is to see the attitudes of many boys who regard success at school as being a candidate for a “nerd”,not being trendy and something to be ashamed about. You hear boys making excuses about doing well rather than saying “I put in a ton of effort”
One sees in the NCEA exams entries in Level 2 and 3 dominated by girls and also in scholarship. These girls are well organized and socialised for success
An informal concern I have is that the boys seem to see a lack of preparation as a “sword of honour”. To be a top sportsman, playing first XV rugby,cricket and other sports ranks higher than achievement in the classroom.
Maybe with the increase of female teaching staff, that has created a model for these girls of 17,18 and 19.
Somehow we must lift the horizons of our young male population.
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Neil – the brawn’s better than brain for boys isn’t new but it is of concern, even though the importance of computers now ought to make “nerds” more valued.
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Oh dear – IQ tests are culturally biased towards those that set them so that they (those that set them) score well – thus validating their own intellectual superiority.
Given today’s ideological obsession that boys and girls, men and women are interchangeable – when they are not it has been necessary to feminize education and in time this has lead to IQ tests biased towards female thinking.
2/3 of bachelors degrees are awarded to females in this modern age and a great many of them are worthless – Jim Flynn’s own discipline Political “Science” being essentially pointless when it comes to putting food into peoples bellys or creating anything of merit.
And when it comes to gender studies ……….
My definition of smart might be being able to turn a worm drive on a screw cutting lathe but for some strange reason that sort of skill does not count as intelligence whereas talking tosh using big words in sentences of paragraph length does.
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My step-son was the best all-rounder at his school- the first who was not in the 1st XV in living memory. He was astonished. This says a lot about boys’ schools. Yet son and friends -some whom were were in the 1st XV recognised how silly the emphasis was on rugby.
P.S. Richie McCaw was two years behind him
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