I heard this news blurb recently on the radio, and found it again online by accident recently.

According to the latest research, women are brighter than men.
For the first time in IQ testing, psychologists have found that female scores have risen above those of men.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2173808/Women-overtake-men-IQ-tests-time-100-years-multitasking.html

What is really bizarre about this piece of news is that IQ tests are designed so that male and female IQ scores come out to be equal. I came across that factoid by chance while purusing a book on brain/AI/intelligence recently…

It is interesting to note that the procedure for selecting questions for this test was that the questions had to satisfy preconceived notions of what results the test should produce. This is standard practice in all intelligence test construction. For example, questions that yield systematically higher scores for either boys or girls are eliminated. By use of question selection and scoring procedures, the test was constructed so that for the white American population, biased somewhat toward urban and above-average socioeconomic level persons, the scores would have a normal distribution with an average score of 100, and a standard deviation of 16.
(“Intelligence: The Eye, the Brain, and the Computer”, Martin A. Fischler & Oscar Firschein, 1987, page 10)

...and Wikipedia confirms this…

Most IQ tests are constructed so that there are no overall score differences between females and males.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology

So why is this even news? They structure IQ tests so that males and females come out the same, then when that equality varies by a few points, they report that one sex is brighter than another! Even if one asserts that one sex’s average IQ is changing in recent years, on an absolute scale that particular sex’s IQ might be offset by a much farther amount than a few points. That possibility isn’t even considered in the discussion in that news article. Either the reporter is unaware of IQ test structuring, or there is some other issue involved that wasn’t mentioned, or else somebody has some strange agenda to promote some point of view.

Of more interest to me, though still a minor issue, is that Fischler & Fischler’s book mentions that IQ has a standard deviation of 16, which conflicts with Wikipedia’s statement that that standard deviation is 15:

When modern IQ tests are devised, the mean (average) score within an age group is set to 100 and the standard deviation (SD) almost always to 15, although this was not always so historically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

Maybe in 1987 the standard was different. The only reason I even noticed the discrepency is lately I’ve been working so extensively with the statistics of testing as related to IQ tests, as I’ve reported in an earlier post. Another explanation, more likely: I merely typed it wrong. I’ll check on that within a week when I get back to the library.

Follow up: I rechecked the Fischler & Firschein text today, and they do state a standard deviation of 16, not 15. My typing was accurate.

One further topic may be worthwhile discussion in relation to the biological basis of intelligence, namely sex differences. With respect to IQ, these are relatively small, favouring females up to puberty, males in adulthood. It is rather difficult to come to any rational conclusion on the point because IQ tests are constructed with the express aim of obliterating any sex differences, this puts a constraint on existing tests and makes sex comparison difficult. Quite large differences appear on special abilities, and most work has been directed at these differences. Males are favoured quite strongly on visio-spatial tasks, for example, tasks which involve rotating patterns in one’s mind to see what they would look like after rotation, and spatio-temporal tasks like tracking a moving object through space. These differences are quite large, corresponding to the difference between 100 IQ and 112 IQ. Mathematical ability and quantitative task generally find males superior after puberty.
  On the other hand, some verbal tasks show substantial mean differences favouring females. Verbal fluency is one of these; a typical test would require the subject to name as many words as possible beginning with a given letter. Synonym generation is another such task; given a word, the subject has to give a synonym. Composition, reading, and spelling also show females superior, while dyslexia and other reading disabilities are more frequent in males. In part these gender differences may be social, a consequence of subtle and overt differences between the experiences, expectations, and gender roles of females and males—although of course there in turn may only reflect hormonal influences—testosterone levels in normal males were correlated positively with some measures of spatial ability; and negatively with some measures of verbal ability. Administration of testosterone increased performance on visio-spatial feats in older males.
(“A New Look at Intelligence”, Hans J. Eysenck, 1998, page 76)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnFvbOwToxA

Roger Davie - Nov 18, 2012:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnFvbOwToxA

Similar attitude and humor…

Weird Science (2/12) Movie CLIP - Making a Girl (1985) HD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8dldLG_ZhI

(I hope it’s obvious that no offense is intended by these video selections.)