Michael Harper for redOrbit.com — Your Universe Online
“Woman brane reel gud, better then men brane.”
Here´s another study for the “obvious” file: Women are smarter than men. As you reach for this file (which by now should be located in an easy-to-reach spot on your desk) you´ll likely notice several other stories bearing the same headline.
For example, a 2008 Higher Education Policy Institute report said women are not only more likely to get into better schools, they´re also more likely to outperform the men once there.
Then, in 2009, a British researcher named Adrian Furnham released a report which said men and women likely have the same levels of intelligence, but men are more apt to think they are smarter than women. Another story for the “Obvious” file.
In 2010, some researchers created an online version of the popular board game “Trivial Pursuit” to study which sex has the better brain. Five months and more than 15 million questions later, the researchers said women answered more questions correctly than men.
Today´s report says women, on average, score 5 points higher than men in IQ tests. According to James Flynn, an expert on IQ tests, this is the first time in over 100 years women have scored higher than men, and it´s likely due to all that multi-tasking women are so gosh-darned good at.
“In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women´s have risen faster,” said Flynn.
“This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ,” he added.
Mr. Flynn’s research suggests taking care of kids, holding down a job, and keeping up with the resulting schedules of each can really pump up a woman´s brain power. Though women have always had this mental power (a point raised in Furnham´s 2009 research) Mr. Flynn says they´re only now realizing it.
“The full effect of modernity on women is only just emerging,” said Flynn. He plans to alert the women of the world about their mental super powers in an upcoming book. He also says he plans to conduct more research to fully explain the ever-rising intelligence of the fairer sex.
Looking to women from Argentina, Canada, Estonia, western Europe, New Zealand and the United States, Mr. Flynn´s report shows that the gap, though minimal, is more apparent in westernized countries where women are more likely to work and take care of families.
When Mr. Flynn studied the IQs of women in Australia, he found men and women were almost identical.
It´s all a part of evolution, says Mr. Flynn, who also suspects British women are smarter than British men, though there isn´t enough data to prove him right.
“As the world gets more complex, and living in it demands more abstract thought, so people are adapting.”
While a peer-reviewed study is always a nice “so there!” to end any Battle-of-the-Sexes argument, it´s also worth noting that anyone married to a woman is likely already well aware of this fact.
It´s also interesting to note that the majority of these studies are performed by men, calling into question their ability to ever learn anything.
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