Published: The Good Men Project (October 4, 2015)
In a recent editorial for Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos is pushing for the argument that “the smartest people in the world are all men.” To support this claim, Yiannopoulos is relying on that old staple for pseudoscientific arguments – IQ tests.
“There’s little doubt that men occupy more of the higher end of the IQ scale,” Yiannopoulos observes. “Every study comes out the same. IQ isn’t a perfect measure of everything, but it’s the best indicator available of whether someone will be able to compete at the very highest levels.” Because men significantly outnumber women at the higher extremes of IQ scores, Yiannopoulos concludes that this explains why women are underrepresented in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).
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There are two points worth mentioning here. For one thing, despite devoting considerable time to analyzing the different male-to-female ratios found at the upper ends of the IQ charts, Yiannopolous never bothers demonstrating that there is an actual correlation between those measurements and objective intelligence. Rather than attempt to explain the inherent flaw in that point-of-view on my own, I shall instead refer to the forefather of intelligence tests himself, Alfred Binet:
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“The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured.”
Suffice to say that countless studies – psychiatric, biological, genetic, and sociological – have reinforced the unassailable wisdom of Benet’s observation in the century since he made it. What’s more, although this detail is commonly overlooked today, Binet’s tests were designed to help weed out disruptive students in classroom environments, not to determine the overall cognitive capacities of entire groups of human beings. Considering that disproving a definite connection between IQ and intelligence deals a fatal blow to Yiannopoulos’ case, one might assume that it’d be unnecessary for me to further analyze the errors in that pundit’s survey. Unfortunately, there is another problem that transcends even the unwarranted confidence placed in these tests – namely, the Flynn Effect.
Referring to a phenomenon in which a nation’s average IQ test scores have gradually increased over the years, the Flynn Effect also blows a giant hole in Yiannopoulos’ sexist conclusion. “In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster,” said Flynn in an interview with Forbes Magazine [boldface added]. “This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.” He later added that the “improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were disadvantaged in the past.” In short, only does the Flynn Effect prove that IQ tests are quite subjective (otherwise their results would remain relatively constant regardless of time and location), but it specifically demonstrates that as social and educational equality begins to have its effect, the gap between men and women starts to close.
Will this silence Yiannopoulos and his fellow MRAs (such as the folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted his article) about the alleged superiority of the male gender? Probably not, but it’s a shame that for all of their talk about intelligence, they have yet to display any of that trait when trying to advance their regressive agenda.