> intelligence distribution skews more male at the higher end
Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women?
Really? You think there are inherently more intelligent men than women?
For many species, males have a higher standard deviation across a variety factors. There are biological reasons for this, since males are more disposable than females for reproduction. Think of one rooster for a dozen hens - this is still a viable flock, even if the other roosters get eaten. Nature can experiment more with males simply because the stakes are lower, and sometimes those experiments are worthwhile. [edit: Turns out this is not true for birds, so I learned something!]
Now, if you have two normal distributions with the same average and area but a tiny difference in the standard deviation... well, let's not go there because the math is too politically incorrect. [edit: And besides, many other factors affect outcomes besides genetics, so I do believe we should keep policies gender-unbiased as a matter of principle].
Note that birds do not have mammalian sex chromosomes - males have ZZ and females have ZW - and females have been measured to have greater variability in birds.
So there is not really a biological reason as you say -- it just happened to go one way or the other in the past, and now different trees of species are stuck that way.
> men on average have higher intelligence than women by 3-5 IQ points
Maybe, but negligible.
What's probably more significant, when looking at a sub-population, is the variation in intelligence for men and women: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158978/
The standard deviation for the population of men is higher than women, so you get more outliers for men, smarter and dumber, but the average is the same. If that's true, then the math says the upper percent will consist of more men than women, assuming a split population. The dumb end will also have more men.
I realize this is taboo, but I don't see how any other conclusion can be made. I don't think it matters though, in the grand scheme of things, assuming the hiring is based on merit rather than bias. And, if the above is true, there's a better chance that you hire a dumb man than a dumb woman, so merit is important.
Uh, yes. This is a well-established fact.
Women have two X chromosomes, both of which get used [1], and men only have one. So this should be your baseline expectation. In women, that genetic information used to construct the brain, gets, loosely speaking, averaged together.
It is of course also consistent with every empirical observation. E.g. the on the math SAT, 1.6x as many men score 700-800, 2x as many men score 800, despite the fact that the school system is biased against boys. And on grade school and high school math contests (such as the AMC, the AIME), the male/female ratio increases more and more the higher the scores go, up to 89% male before sample size was too small for me to get a read on the proportion. Of the top 10 Jeopardy champions, 9 out of 10 are male.
[1] that both X chromosomes get used as they do in the rest of the body is something you wouldn't want to just assume -- among various ways to verify this, see https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...
Intelligence testing is a human created concept. There are all manner of cultural biases encoded in it. Intelligence is more than just being good at sums which is what your math SAT example seems to suggest.
Jeopardy champions are hardly a representative group. They're a self-selecting group by definition : those who chose to go on a quiz show. Maybe men show a bias towards showing off on TV or are better at remembering random facts. Your example doesn't control for any of those.
But you seem to be ignoring the test scores. Why is that?
The math SAT questions aren't a "bunch of sums." And I agree with you about cultural bias. As I stated, the school system is biased against boys. So the SAT math scores should understate the male/female ratio at that level.
However it wouldn't be surprising to me if higher end SAT scores would be highly correlated with likelihood of being hired at FAANGs of this world later in life.
If the above is true, and given that the SAT score distribution is shallower and wider for males, then it'd probably follow that there would be more males employed at those places than females, even if the hiring would be totally controlled for biases?
Or, is it your point that there's (probably) correlation here, but not causation? As in, there's bias against females (there most likely is), so more males are hired, and it's an independent fact that males have broader SAT scores distribution. Ergo, if we controlled for biases, then faang hiring results would be 50/50 male/female, even if SAT score distribution would stay the same?
That being said, yes, we can change our environment and see changes in measured intelligence. A person with a head is smarter than one without.
To tie it back to your original point, you're saying the male/female differences in intelligence are purely environmental? As in, if two people with different genetic make ups were brought up in the same environment they'd have the same outcomes?
If we're seeing equality it's likely the result of changing our environment to force this.
You’ve edited your post while I wrote this response. Your final point is a straw man. I didn’t say anything like that. Good day to you
Can you explain to me how our genetics don't dictate our responses? Short of God or some other unknown unknown (which is certainly possible), I don't see how it could be anything else.
Identical twins aren't in identical environments. It's not possible.
Sorry for the edits, I was trying to shortcut the argument based on what I thought you were saying.
This article doesn't prove the point you thought you were making.
Also, for an unexplained reason, they only consider Indian players. That's weird, isn't it? Why Indian? Let's investigate.
Using the Oct 20th 2020 data, since the Oct 6th 2020 data isn't available on the FIDE website, we could look Chinese players (birthday <2000 to follow their criteria):
I picked China because they're a large country and because the top active female player is Chinese.
Of the top Chinese players, the ordering is 8 males, 1 female (Hou, Yifan), 12 males, 1 female (Xie, Jun), then 3 M, 1 F, 5 M, 1 F, 1 M, 1 F, 2 M, 1 F, and so on.
The overall Chinese female percentage is 30.47%. Here's a table of percentage over rating threshold, with cumulative sums shown.
M F M Sum F Sum FSum/(MSum+FSum)
2800 0 0 0 0 -
2700 5 0 5 0 0.00%
2600 10 1 15 1 6.25%
2500 15 4 30 5 14.29%
2400 38 10 68 15 18.07%
2300 55 10 123 25 16.89%
2200 76 31 199 56 21.96%
2100 89 40 288 96 25.00%
2000 48 29 336 125 27.11%
1900 42 17 378 142 27.31%
1800 42 25 420 167 28.45%
1700 27 15 447 182 28.93%
1600 27 11 474 193 28.94%
1500 13 14 487 207 29.83%
1400 9 2 496 209 29.65%
1300 3 4 499 213 29.92%
1200 1 3 500 216 30.17%
1100 2 1 502 217 30.18%
1000 0 3 502 220 30.47%
M F M sum F sum FSum/(MSum+FSum)
2800 0 0 0 0 -
2700 3 0 3 0 0.00%
2600 10 0 13 0 0.00%
2500 16 2 29 2 6.45%
2400 38 0 67 2 2.90%
2300 68 9 135 11 7.53%
2200 150 11 285 22 7.17%
2100 321 31 606 53 8.04%
2000 556 57 1162 110 8.65%
1900 591 42 1753 152 7.98%
1800 750 66 2503 218 8.01%
1700 920 53 3423 271 7.34%
1600 1321 74 4744 345 6.78%
1500 1585 117 6329 462 6.80%
1400 2135 129 8464 591 6.53%
1300 2671 141 11135 732 6.17%
1200 2962 165 14097 897 5.98%
1100 2566 139 16663 1036 5.85%
1000 1592 139 18255 1175 6.05%
It is worthwhile to check out India having filtered out the inactive players:
M F M sum F sum
2800 0 0 0 0 -
2700 3 0 3 0 0.00%
2600 9 0 12 0 0.00%
2500 13 2 25 2 7.41%
2400 30 0 55 2 3.51%
2300 36 8 91 10 9.90%
2200 44 6 135 16 10.60%
2100 47 7 182 23 11.22%
2000 56 11 238 34 12.50%
1900 51 8 289 42 12.69%
1800 72 7 361 49 11.95%
1700 128 6 489 55 10.11%
1600 179 3 668 58 7.99%
1500 234 7 902 65 6.72%
1400 370 8 1272 73 5.43%
1300 493 10 1765 83 4.49%
1200 605 14 2370 97 3.93%
1100 513 18 2883 115 3.84%
1000 296 20 3179 135 4.07%
If we were to compute the article's bogus statistical argument about the top woman, a more appropriate female percentage to use would be more like 12.69%, the maximum on that list, before the hoard of mediocre males, instead of 6.1%.
It would make more sense to base our statistics on the set of all the world's active players, instead of one woman from a particular country against an irrelevant percentage. Here is that data:
M F M sum F sum Fsum/(Msum+Fsum)
2800 2 0 0 0 -
2700 32 0 32 0 0.00%
2600 186 1 218 1 0.46%
2500 437 11 655 12 1.80%
2400 1049 39 1704 51 2.91%
2300 1928 87 3632 138 3.66%
2200 3385 156 7017 294 4.02%
2100 5699 231 12716 525 3.96%(And I'm not even here to have this argument -- it's just a basic fact behind one of the reasons why some tech companies would skew more male than others -- but then some people decided to argue.)
And more generally Adrian's reply.
Not only that, he defines it via the exponentially increasing ELO rating distribution, instead of rank order, and that would have the effect of piling up a bunch of lower ranked players together within one standard deviation of the mean. This means it would be virtually impossible to get a result 1 standard deviation out, let alone 2.
The skew only means the smartest 1% of men are smarter than the smartest 1% of women.
On the other side of the curve the same is true. The dumbest men are dumber than the dumbest women.
That means a larger percent of women occupy the IQ sweet spot.
I don't think you can put it like that. Even if the IQ (or similar "cognitive capacity" score) distribution is broader&shallower for males, it doesn't mean what you had said.
Judith Polgar was #7th in chess rankings, even if overall number of players scored with ELO is counted in millions?
Are you arguing with my 1% figure or the concept I was trying to relay?
The concept is correct IMO, the percentage is a guess.