Sex differences in intelligence

Question 1

Statistics

Answer 1

• PRimary and secondary education similar
• More females in tertiary enrolment
• Females slightly higher in life-expectancy
• Lowe percentage of women in parliament
  Top 200 ASX companies in Australia: only 40 have reached the aim of having 30% women on their board. 30% companies have no females at all, 58 just 1 female
• Graduate salaries are 3.9% less for women vs men
• COVID-19: 6.5% lower earnings for women
• Women were more significantly worse off than men on average from a sample (particularly emotional functioning)
  Womens representation in science had increased, first author, still fewer papers, less likely to publish on her own, less likely to publish on her own, less likely to be Principle investigatores (PI)

Women less likely to
- Be first authors
- Be cited
- Receive SPSP publication award

Females received 28% less funding for biomedical research than males
Media representationon females in the workforce was worse before, slowly improving

Question 2

Difference in g between men and women

Answer 2

5 year prospective logintudinal study examinned association between psychometric intelligence at age 11 and educational achievement in national examinations in 25 academic subjects at age 16
- Girls showed no advantage in g but performed signficiantly better on all subjects except Physics (not due to verbal ability).

Question 3

PISA, 2018

Answer 3

Men more likely to expect careers in maths and science, even though there is no difference in ability
- In the UK, there is a push for women to go into STEM

Question 4

Sex differences exist, but does this refect true differences in ability

Answer 4

Historically there have been conflicting results
- Earlier tudies report no differences

Terman (1916): Girls>boys [trivial size]
Spearman (1927): No sex differences
Wechsler (1944):
Girls > boys [trivial size]
Catell (1960s): no difference
RPM studies conducted in 1980s and 1990s show no differences

Other studies report large differences
- Males better on mechanical tasks, girls better at vebal tasks
Raven’s Progressive Matrices - Meta analysis: males>females
Innate, unachangeable or not?

Question 5

Explanations for these differences?

Answer 5

-Mathematic ability might be dependant on spatial and mechanical abilities
- Small differences in central tendenecy imply larger differences at the extreme
- Differences in variances between males compared to females (e.g., psychological traits)
- In some personality traits, range of scores for males is greater than range of score for females
- Several large studies indicated males general intelligence is 10% larger than variance of Females
- Studies reported the VR values of 1-1.08 for vocab and, 1.05-1.25 for mathematics and 0.87-1.04 for self-esteem
Means do not differ significant, however the spread of scores are clearly different
Implication: Males occupy the extremes (both lowest and highest achievement groups)

Cultural differences?
- In singapore, females outperform males in math ability but still have less confidence
- F more likely to be underconfident, M more likely to be overconfident

Motivation?
- Almost all countries, girls show more anxiety than males in mathematics

PISA study
- Even though girls have similar capability in maths and science, they report lower levels of self-efficacy and self-concept
- Boys tend to over-claim
- Girls have lower confidence and higher levle of anxiety, resulting in less intrinsic motivation
- Different expectations
- Differences in specific abilities across males and females

Question 6

Points to take home

Answer 6

• Important differences between Males and Females still exist
• From a scientific point of view, the gender similarities hypothesis (Ms and Fs are alike on most-but not all-psychological variables) seems to be more supported to the differences model (Ms and Fs are vastly different psychologically)
• Gender researches have emphasize imporance of context in creating, erasing or even reversing psychological gender differences
• Although most cognitive differences seem to be shrinking, one important exception is spatial/mechanical abilities

There are several explanations for this: They may all be closely interconnected, with “learning being a socially mediated event with a biological basis.”