Women Surpass Men’s IQ Scores For First Time In History

Women had been lagging behind men by five points for the past 100 years, the British paper said.

Remember the childhood rhyme, “Girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider?”

Well, the rhyme isn’t exactly true. Men have also gotten more intelligent, and though women may have surpassed men in their scores, the difference is minimal. The results were published by James Flynn, an expert in IQ testing who says the “demands of the modern age” are what has raised the intelligence bar, the Telegraph reported.

He tolf the Telegraph, “In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen, but women’s have risen faster. This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.”

Flynn collected IQ test results from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina and Estonia, the Daily Maill said — the data showed that the differences in scores between men  and women were slight.

The Daily Mail quoted Flynn as saying, “As the world gets more complex, and living in it demands more abstract thought, so people are adapting.”

He added, “I suspect that the same trends are happening in Britain, too, although the data is too sparse to be sure.”

So what sparked women’s IQ hikes? One theory is that the task of juggling a family and a career made women smarter, in addition to realizing they are worthy of being more intelligent than what is expected of them, the Telegraph theorized.

Flynn published the new findings in his new book and said, “The brains of modern people are growing differently and showing increased cognitive complexity, which we measure as increases in IQ. This improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were disadvantaged in the past.”

But Flynn could not provide definite evidence to explain the trend. He said more data was necessary.

Helena Jamieson, 33, told the Telegraph that she supported the idea that women are capable of taking on the role of “hunter-gatherer.”

When speaking about her marriage to Luke, a 37-year-old stay-at-home father, she said, “We have done the role reversal. I’m definitely the more intellectual person in the relationship and I’m at work full time while he is raising our daughter.”

“I think women probably always knew deep down that they were the more intelligent ones – but as the gentler sex we were quiet about it and let men continue to believe they ruled the world.”

Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/