'Men cleverer than women'

Yes, your claimed relationship is wrong. I thought that would be obvious.

Cite. Anyway here is one from the field of psychology that has a good few references:

http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_19-editionID_132-ArticleID_987-getfile_getPDF/thepsychologist%5C0206rile.pdf
Neptosim & Sexism in peer-review, C. Wenneras et al. Nature, May 1997 is also a good read.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2001_09_14/noDOI.10565480637185635938 - This also has some good references (from Science).

I don't agree really. I think people vastly under-estimate the inventiveness and mental agility required to be a truly exceptional experimental scientist. It is very easy to fall into the trap of believing that theoretical physics is somehow inherently intellectually superior to all other forms of science, but it just doesn't add up when you actually spend time in research (as I have done). I really don't think it is anything short of genius to be able to single-handedly derived the steps needed to chemically isolate a new element and define its properties in an age before any kind of sophisiticated spectroscopy. Understanding that radiation can be used to image the interior of the body and also to treat illness is also another massive step forward for a single individual to make.

So what have modern theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking achieved in the same length of time as Marie Curie achieved her work? Well, not actually that much. We are still stuck with the same problems that we were stuck with in the 70's. We have failed to move on since the standard model. All we have now is multiple conflicting theories that are advanced without any observational back-up. The fact that people like you can suggest that Hawking is a greater genius than Curie because he happens to be a theoretical physicist and that is 'harder' is totally preposterous.

Why feminists in this thread are so enraged about this? I don't get it. It is proper research what is there to get mad about?

Do u do a science by an chance....i would think not by reading yr post...theoretical physics or any science is far less mental capability than experimental, my friend...Theory is just cramming what somebody wrote so many years ago and memorising it to the best of yr ability. And im sure that some of that theory you have to learn is Marie curie's discoveries. How convienient..U need a lot of mental ability, the ability to think outside the box to do experimental work its not just cramming S**** , u actually do thinking for a change....

When has ever intelligence = academia?, i tell u some of the most academic people are just parrots who are very good at memorising the text book and getting 100%, outside academia they cant hold a single conversation to save their lives nor think for themselves..Intelligence is more than just cramming the textbook, some people have gone far with other kinds of intelligence.

And this measure of IQ as a measure of intelligent is just BS, the IQ test is already biased in favour of the middle class/elite white male anyone outside that category isnt in general isnt gonna score that great..Some of these people with these high IQs, who have been termed geniuses with maybe around >180, 200 or over, Mensa comes to mind, are such incompetent idiots who cant deal with day to day life, like tying your shoes or figuring out when its time to p**p...and need some body to help them along. What kind of intelligence is that? ..LOL im not saying all genius are like that...just some outta there.

An IQ score doesn't mean anything because of different tests. For example you may score 384 in one and 21 in the other, yet the 384 score has a worse average.

Another note: Men are proven to be able to boost brainpower extremely high if under certain hormones which females *cough* don't possess.

I don't think that, I expect there would be a very high correlation

That's neat, I always felt I'm at completely different level after puberty so there may be substance to my thoughts. Do you have anything about that research? I could only find something about IQ and testosterone in the womb or in prepubescent boys, nothing about adults.

There is nothing that looks like a study or a research on sexism in your references, let alone with positive results, the closest I've come was a reference to a report in your first link:
"Clearly then, women are disadvantaged in academia at a structural level. Echoing the findings of the Greenfield Report"
And this report is nowhere on the net.

LOL @ the mensa dudes
my only response
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_physics
actually, the thinking part of experimental physics could be termed theoretical, it just contains so much less of it than proper theoretical that a distinction have been made. And even if IQ isn't a good measure of intelligence, it is the best we have.

What do you mean by 'do you have anything about that research?'? It's been proven and shown with thorough testing... I can't quite remember but I think it was by the University of Manchester.

Yes, u need to know yr theory to do an experiment but u also need something extra...the ability to anaylse & interpret results , making observations etc...while if its theory well u can just memorise stuff ...doesnt seem like much brain power is needed there...

Most of science was discovered from doing experiments ,thats the basis of science ..otherwise it might well just be called history or philosophy....even great theorotical phycisists like albert einsten had to do a lot of experiments to come up with their groundbreaking theory...

...

It's the reference sections of those reports that are of interest. I pick those links as they had most of the commonly cited reports referenced so you can use scopus or whatever to find them. I've looked into this before (for an article I wrote for the learned society I'm in). I don't really have time to trawl through the literature to pick out every report for someone I don't even know. Also I wouldn't bother with Susan Greenfield's report anyway.

Experimentation is not mainly getting observations at all. That is the biggest load of rubbish I have ever heard! In my PhD about 6 months of my time was spent performing experiments, the other 2 and 1/2 years was spent analysing the data and proposing new theoretical explanations for my observations. It's clear to me that you really don't know the first thing about research if you think that performing experiments is not a mental activity. I'd like to see you figure out why you aren't getting any counts on your analyser in a synchrotron beamline at 4 am in the morning without knowing a fair bit of physics off the top of your head.

Generally, even within science (even within physics), people often confuse mathematical obscurity with difficulty. This may work in the taught environment, but it translates very poorly in the research environment. Why? Because step-change in any field requires the ability to conceptualise outside the accepted framework and this, imho, requires as much genius in biology as it does in physics - in fact I'd say that this is the real test of genius.

Who cares if not a single woman was involved in modern physics? We are talking about an intensely patriarchal area of society. Women were involved in the discovery of DNA, radioactivity, pulsars, protein structure and the theory of infection off the top of my head. This is amazing considering the active discrimination faced by women in science well into the late 20th century.

It's clear that your ideas rest on assumption that theoretical physics is much harder than other areas of science and therefore proves that, because of the lack of women in that area, men are better. Unfortunately I, and much of the scientific community, simply don't agree with you.

My point about being stuck at the standard model is that we have failed to make any real progress in theory since that point, despite the celebrated brilliance of male physicists like Stephen Hawking (funny how no-one ever mentions Lisa Randall, despite being Professor of the damn subject at Harvard). This is a response to other posters who claimed that Hawking was more intelligent than Marie Curie, despite the fact that her breakthoughs were massive compared to Hawking's.

Of course, I've encounter all this many, many times before whilst I was researching in physics. Physicists are probably the worst science for sexism and also the most self-hating as well (unless you are a theoretician, in which case you often have a god complex). Physics's history is founded on experimental science and indeed experiment is the basis for all good science it is what separates science from philosophy and pure mathematics. I always found it odd that physicists should hate the core part of their subject so much and idolise theory alone as being better - physics really is in trouble, just like Lee Smolin has said. And before you trot out the crap about theory leading experiment, then that is demonstrably false throughout the history of science. Indeed, modern physics would not have arisen if it weren't for the experimental observations of Rayleigh, Compton, Rutherford & Le Verrier.

Research shows that Men's and Women's intelligence levels differ in distribution. Although the average is the same (or extremely similar), there are more men on both ends of the bell-curve spectrum. This is why women outperform men throughout GCSEs and A levels, there are more averagely intelligent women who are therefore capable of reaching the top grades (because of the easiness of todays exams), and the more frequent men at the top of the spectrum aren't differentiated against other pupils because the exams are too easy to distinguish between students that can get A's and student that are at a much higher level that that.

Am I the only person who thinks this debate is pointless? So men on average have a higher IQ than women. OK. and? I don't get what point the OP is trying to make.

Also as far as I was aware the real relationship between male and female IQ was best represented like this:


although the 'exams are getting easier' argument is very hard to prove as teaching standards have vastly improved and many students work harder these days due to a growing middle class where many many more students are expected to go to university therefore expectations, and efforts, are raised.