zekko said:
I think women are a lot smarter than guys here give them credit for. If they weren't, they wouldn't be able to graduate college at a higher rate than their male counterparts. A lot of those degree programs are not that easy.
Intelligent does not equal
intellectual. As a Mensa member I have seen that over and over again. Intelligence helps you see cause and effect, but most people only use it to solve the textbook problems needed to get a good grade. And good grades, for the most part, don't even require a particularly high intelligence, only memorization.
I was always very good at history, for example. I could explain why Roman emperors and Medieval kings acted the way they did, what was behind a war, what was behind a religion, what drove the Goths, etc. I wasn't as good at remembering numbers. The girls in high school who could remember what year a king was born and what year a war ended would always get higher grades, since they got higher marks at the history tests. In discussions about the events, they were completely disinterested. Except for the occasional feminist who was eager to use history as a way to show how men and religions are evil for being behind wars.
Women have the same IQ average as men, but they are closely gathered around the mean. Men have more outliers, in this and other mental fields. Men are also braver. Which is why most geniuses and great thinkers will always be men.
Deep Dish said:
Ten years ago, I wrote a seminal essay here called
“The Book of Woman,” and discussed this very topic. The following is a transcript I had discovered:
Absolutely correct that women are not interested in philosophy the way men are.
When I say "men", I think of the intelligent, intellectual men. These are a minority, but they are the minority that moves the world forward. Among women the intelligent intellectuals are an even smaller minority, very small.
Women who are religious don't count. Religion is a security blanket telling you that you never have to die, and that you will be rewarded forever. That is not higher thought. Higher thought is about finding purpose in the universe, the nature of morality, etc.
For women it is personal or it is nothing. Why? Probably because they have always been more at risk than men. Men in the Stone Age could survive on their own, women could not. They had to find a man to provide for and defend them, and still they had to live in fear. Women are instinctively risk-averse as a result, and thinking freely is a risk.
No wonder then that men have more IQ outliers - in both directions. And more mental outliers in other mental fields, e.g. linguistics, spatial recognition, mathematics, etc. Those with wild outliers are more prone to take risks, either because they are too dumb to stay safe, or because they are smart enough to know what they are doing. Women are more closely gathered among the mean, which is safer, and good for someone who has children to take care of.
So, risk takers are found mostly among men. Only risk takers will go for an "all or nothing" strategy - setting out to find gold at distant shores, for example. Most risk takers die, but a few survive and gain wealth and power and conquests, and these will have access to many more women, spreading their risk-taking genes.
To take risks and embark on great endeavors, a man must be able to think about what is far away from his everyday routine. Thought about abstract matters - philosophy - is passed on this way.
This is known in politics and in marketing. If you want to affect the female audience, make them support a new taxation policy or a war or dishing out money in some direction, what do you do? Show them pictures of crying children. That will influence them far more than a list of statistics. They will react to the pictures of crying children the way they would react to real people in their own lives. Again: for women it is personal or it is nothing. Statistics are abstract and therefore not really real, unless they can be used to support what you already want to do. Pictures of crying children seem more real.