After all the controversy that arose after I posted my breakdown of college majors by gender last week, I promised myself I’d stay away from controversial gender-related topics for a while. But when I ran across an ETS-curated data set of average student IQs by college major, I couldn’t avoid putting this visualization together. Below, I plotted several college major’s estimated average student IQ over the gender ratio of that major.
The result? A shockingly clear correlation: the more female-dominated a college major is, the lower the average IQ of the students studying in the major. A naive reader may look at this graph and conclude that men are smarter than women, but it is vital to note that, on average, men and women have about the same IQ.
By popular request, here’s an interactive version of the above chart: https://plot.ly/~randal_olson/10
IQs are typically classified as follows:
- 130+: Very superior intelligence
- 120-129: Superior
- 110-119: Above average
- 90-109: Average
Considering that many of the female-dominated majors heavily involve interpersonal interactions, my initial thought was that this all made sense: Women are widely believed to be more socially-inclined and nurturing than men, so we would expect to see them dominate fields that heavily involve people. But how does that explain the drastic IQ differences between male- and female-dominated fields, if the average man and woman have the same IQ?
The answer comes from the fact that the IQ score here is estimated from the students’ SAT score. This isn’t an altogether unreasonable approach: Several studies have shown a strong correlation between SAT scores and IQ scores. But if we break down the SAT score by Verbal and Quantitative, we see why this IQ estimation is potentially misleading.
If we re-make the first plot against the Verbal SAT score, we see that it’s basically a wash: there’s no correlation between a major’s gender ratio and the average student’s Verbal SAT score.
When we plot the students’ Quantitative SAT score against the major’s gender ratio, we see the negative correlation appear again. This tells us that the original plot is actually showing preference for quantitative majors: The higher the estimated IQ, the more quantitative the major (with Philosophy being an odd exception), and the less women enrolling in those majors. Many women tend to avoid mathematics due to social stigma, lack of exposure during childhood, etc., and this fact is ultimately reflected in their SAT performance.
Technical bits
Some of my readers requested the R^2 for the above plots. Here they are:
The R^2 on the IQ vs major’s gender ratio graph is 0.601
The R^2 on the Verbal SAT vs. major’s gender ratio graph is 0.019
The R^2 on the Quantitative SAT vs. major’s gender ratio graph is 0.738
The R^2 between Quantitative SAT score and Verbal SAT score is 0.027
For those who want to know what R^2 means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_determination
re: But how does that explain the drastic IQ differences between male- and female-dominated fields, if the average man and woman have the same IQ?
The link to the article sums it up. “males typically outnumber females substantially among high-scoring individuals.”
It is well known from several studies that while men and women have about the same mean IQ of 100, the variance in IQ for men is much higher than that of women.
People who attend college are biased toward the upper end of the IQ spectrum (both intuitively and obvious from your dataset); thus we expect men to be “smarter” than women using this subset of data only.
If you plotted the inverse dataset (occupation by IQ for non-college graduates) you would make an inverse conclusion that women were in fact smarter. I will bet on a waitress against a garbage collector in an IQ test any day.
The women to men ratio of college attendance is something like 60/40. The men who go to college could easily have higher IQs than the women for that reason alone.
That could explain why male-dominated majors are filled with high-IQ’d individuals, but it can’t explain why high-IQ’d majors are dominated by men.
I think some part of the problem is the bias that is is the SAT exam. Your data set for IQ is just based on SAT scores. The SAT is well known to be biased towards males.
http://www.fairtest.org/gender-bias-college-admissions-tests
However the correlation still looks too strong and other factors are likely in play. One guess is that because more females attend college, the average female IQ in college will be lower.
correlation =/= causation
“The SAT is well known to be biased towards males.”
“Well known”
Yes, one site mentions that guys do 35 points better and 3 points better on the verbal. 3 points!
Give me a break.
Regardless, proving that men do better at a test doesn’t imply that it’s biased towards men unless you cling to the a priori belief that men and women are equal. Numerous studies have shown they are not and many commenters here have explained why observed variance in men and women is consistent with men testing higher on a college bound test.
Mathematics is Pareto optimal!
No, it could have fewer women.
Well, since I don’t believe men are inherently smarter than women either, the reall issue is what IQ really measures. There are tons of discrepancies in IQ scores between various groups, varying largely on cultural differences. A lot f researchers haves looked into it. If I remember it correctly, the upshot of it all is that IQ tests measure how well conditioned a person is to the westernized culture and it’s academics.
Everything measures something. A test that measures how well you will do in the academic environment of your culture? Sounds useful to me! But, I guess what matters most is what you believe.
Interesting. I think there is a relationship with the aspirations to do certain types of work. The majors align nicely with western stereotypes of what men and women are ‘meant’ to do. It may be when people start focusing on their careers that they read less and less stuff that isn’t relevant to them anymore. Psychology majors read psychology papers etc, which makes them less fluent in abstract ideas such as physics and maths.
Also, IQ tests measure more and more our ability to abstractly represent and manipulate information. Accordingly quite abstract subjects like math and physics get people who score high on IQ tests.
It may be that women have a tendency towards careers, for social reasons, that are practical and about interpersonal relationships, which may be self-selecting towards majors that are less abstract and thus score lower on IQ tests?
After looking at the SAT score data, I’ve come to this same conclusion. I think it just goes to show that IQ scores really don’t fully capture intelligence — only the ability to work and think in abstract.
the problem that I have with this is that you reduce gender to an oversimplified binary, presumably based on biological sex. however, even from an academic perspective, gender is not necessarily reducible to biological sex (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_gender_difference). gender encompasses many factors that transcend biological binaries. I assume that your data simplified male to “people with male reproductive organs” and female to “people with female reproductive organs” to female. to do so, in my opinion, ignores the fact that gender is at least largely socially constructed and collapses a highly dimensional feature space (i.e. some space of personality traits) down to a binary space without justifying why such an approach is appropriate.
This study is based on SAT data that asks for your future major and for your gender. Presumably, transgendered students can select their gender according to their gender identity so it is not strictly based on genitalia. It doesn’t matter because there are not very many transgendered students.
That’s cute, too bad your biology and your hormones responsible for, I guess “intelligence” aren’t dependent on how womanly you feel or not.
“gender is at least largely socially constructed”
No, it’s really not. Keep this shit on tumblr and outside of scientific discourse.
Gender socially constructed. Chances are, you don’t have children.
Guessing you assumed this was a woman and started taking out all your male aggression on her for her opinions, yes? Chill out, bro. She’s right that this issue extends beyond biology into the societal realm. The beliefs that society holds about gender does have an effect on how an individual comes to think about their value to society. With regard to schooling, there are studies that prove that a girl’s perception of her worth and ability will effect her test results (no doubt because women process and attend to language differently than men). Stop blowing your load over biology. The innate differences in our brain structure are not in question- it’s the attitude toward these differences that need to be examined. The reality is women are expected to take part in the workforce, which means we need to restructure some areas of our society with respect to gender. Adjusting your language might be a good way to start, lest you’re content with the idea of being surrounded by upset women who have power. Which is what’s happening by the way, and it has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the reaction to women in the workforce. Your assumption that society has no bearing on gender ability is made false by neuroscience which has proven that women are acutely aware of their surroundings and grossly effected by language. You might not have made the connection (another heightened feature in the female brain), though it should have been obvious to you by now since using language techniques with women is quite popular in the manosphere. Luckily there are actually scientists doing the work, instead of arrogantly trolling and trying to silence everyone who has a difference of opinion.
This post certainly begs the question…
Did you just reference Wikipedia in an attempt to disprove a collection of data you disagree with? Bring that SJW BS back to tumblr and stay away from academic discussions. You bring nothing credible to the table.
When someone cite wikipedia, it’s customary to actually check if the article itself references good academic material. While the article does have quite a few problems, there is a vast amount of material on how gender is at least partially a social construct. You’re contributing far less to any academic discussion by dismissing L’s argument for a shitty reason than their argument has.
Nonetheless, as previous commenters have stated, the genders are self reported, and the small amount of trans individuals is unlikely to impact any of the major conclusions. Those are good reasons to argue against L, yours are not.
The reason seems rather obvious: the IQ distribution of men is bimodal, while the IQ distribution of women is unimodal. i.e. You get really smart men, and then see get some REALLY dumb ones. The dumb ones are not reflected since many dont show up in the dataset for college students since they didnt get into college.
I had that thought also, but I don’t think there are enough men on the “genius” end of the spectrum to cause such a large bias in the majors like this.
Women don’t have to earn a living. They can go to college to find a man. So why work the brain muscle too hard?
“Women don’t have to earn a living. They can go to college to find a man. So why work the brain muscle too hard?”
Woman do in fact have to earn a living. Not only is the cost of living such that two incomes are necessary to live comfortably. Some of us actually like to work and think quite poorly of people of this mindset. I am simply amazed a male has the guts to vocalize such an outdated and bigot point of view in this day and age.
Altough tone is hard to read in text, I’m fairly sure that the commentor was being satirical. We can’t always take a comment like this at face value.
I make enough on my own to live comfortably because I am an intelligent male and don’t have to give no bitch no dough
Please don’t breed.
DAE
I have had this discussion with many people about IQ. My wife and I excelled in grade school through high school. She graduated valedictorian. We both went to college. I have a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MBA. She has a BA in Math, and a masters in Computational Engineering (high concept math/computer science mix). Neither of us have ever taken an IQ test. Who takes them? Why? What are the questions? If I never encountered one through academia, what validity does it have. I have always been curious and chalked it up to the test that the scientologists give that feed into people’s ego.
If you read the article, the IQ scores are based on SAT scores.
Actually if you read the article, Skeptic, it says SAT scores are CORRELATED with IQ… not based on them. So much for being a smart ass eh?
How’s Skeptic being a smartass? Jayleigh seemed to call into issue WHO was taking these IQ tests, and Skeptic’s response, I think, was meant to clarify that the given IQ scores are based on actual SAT scores (and this is done, because as you note they are correlated).
Don’t eat from the troll. Statistically any thread of comments on the internet will degrade exponentially to gobbly gook.
If you could make a trellis chart of this data, it may be t(r)elling.
I think it is plausible that the result is explained by a culture that discourages women from analytical pursuits. I also think that more analytical => more discouragement towards women. As this cultural quirk is overturned, we can expect the most analytical majors (ironically)to be the last to give.
W/r/t “The higher the estimated IQ, the more quantitative the major (with Philosophy being an odd exception)” if you replace ‘quantitative’ with ‘analytical’ then philosophy is less of an exception..
A lot of people are analyzing these data wayyyyyy outside the scope of what it intends. The results show a very narrow conclusion: that among college students, male-dominated majors have women in them with higher IQs.
No where in the data does it implicate that IQ correlates to sheer intelligence, or that men are smarter than women in these fields because of IQ variance (how could you possibly get that from the data?).
Watch your scope and don’t make saltatory inferences from data! Please and thank you.
Just two clarifications:
1. I meant male-dominated majors have people* in them with higher IQs.
2. The data suggest that men do, in fact, have higher IQs than women given the IQ variance. That could mean that, in a physics class of 10 with two women, 5 males could have an IQ below 100 and 3 of about 150 (i.e., large variance) and the two women of about 120-130. This plausible example demonstrates that the “higher IQ” statement should not be set in stone. My main point: don’t jump to conclusions. Just take the data for what they’re worth.
Men have greater IQ variance, and the low IQ males are not in Uni.
The amount of fidgeting to get around the truth is quite humorous. Sure, gender identification extends past genitalia, but I bet that single predictor explains the vast majority of the variation between “male” and “female”, as you would have them described. Someone did make a good point that abstraction competency is also only one part of intelligence. It can be equally argued that the individuals who scored highest on the predictive IQ based on SAT inferences are among the more emotionally/socially incompetent out there. Furthermore, there are biological differences in the brain structure of males and females, resulting in higher emotional intelligence for women than men. Facts, by definition, are not slander.
As far as standard IQ goes, the most demanding of the sciences are male dominated. No need to wag the dog.
An easy explanation is that women are on average smarter than men in most of the fields. That way it would be possible that quantitative SAT corresponds to IQ fairly well while both sexes may still have same distribution of scores. It would be possible to test that if you have data for both sexes separately.
Simple example: you may have 20% of women in physics with average IQ 155, 80% men with average IQ 130, making the average IQ for physics 135. Then you may have 80% of women in education with average IQ 115 and 20% men with average IQ 90, i.e. average IQ for education 110. This way you may get the pattern of results in the graph.
If you think philosophy is an “odd exception” in the way you describe, clearly you have at some level never understood what philosophy is all about – pure logic and reasoning. Philosophy involves having a robust understanding of logical principles (which it fathered) — principles which became the mathematical axioms which the fields of math and physics rely on today, so it makes sense they are grouped together. It also makes sense philosophy is slightly lower than mathematics on the chart because it always draws its fair share of lower performing (on average) stoner/hippie students who have found it to be their “goto” major under reasoning such as “I don’t know what to study so I’ll study philosophy because it’s about cool unanswered questions and my friends would think I’m selling out if I became a major other than environmental science or community planning”.
Can you outline the majors that have an average of <100 IQ?
Given that IQ is not static over a person’s lifetime, the obvious question is: are these “IQ” figures (and SAT scores, for that matter) for these students taken before their college education, or after? It would hardly surprise me to find that mechanical engineers and computer scientists are better at puzzle solving, like the kind you’d find on an IQ test.
The URL of the source is “iq-estimates-by-intended-college-major”, which suggests that not only is the IQ score taken from *before* their college education, but there’s no certainty that their intended college major ends up being their actual college major (one of my professors who kept track of such things said that the vast majority of students did not graduate in the field they originally thought they would), or even if they graduated at all.
That is, it’s essentially a self-reported survey. Everyone knows engineers make more money than social workers. Ask a bunch of incoming freshmen what they think they can do. The ones who have been told they’re smart and good at math pick engineering. That’s hardly surprising, but it’s also not very informative.
Could it be that boys who had higher math scores wanted to become engineers, and girls who had higher verbal scores thought they wanted to become teachers and social workers, *because* they had not yet been to college and seen what these fields actually entailed?
I’d be interested to see before-and-after IQ scores for college students, and also before-and-after college majors. As it stands now, these charts are very misleading.
I think a huge part of the difference could be explained with the number of males and females that go to college.
The difference is quite huge. Ranging from 33 to 50% more women than men that go to college.
It could very well be, that a lot of men that could major in female dominated fields drop out or want to do something what they deem more rewarding.
There are a number of factors that combine to affect career and educational choices, including aptitude (which is where I’d include IQ scores as a subfactor), interest, salary aspirations, and social factors such as status/prestige etc. You’ve written insightfully in the past about the disincentives men face in choosing careers such as nursing and education, given the assumptions people tend to make about men in female-dominant professions. Similar factors affect women’s choices. Your interest and aptitude for a subject both have to be considerably higher than average to make it come out as the best choice when you would be a minority in the field.
So overall I’d say what this trend implies is a vicious circle: women avoid STEM careers because they know that other women are avoiding those careers, and being the only woman (or one of a handful of women) in a room full of men is often uncomfortable or embarrassing enough to outweigh other factors in favour of a profession. And the same would be true for men who would have otherwise liked to become, say, nurses, or early childhood educators. Social factors are particularly influential on teenagers, which is where we are in life when we’re choosing our college majors. This would mean that as the percentage of women rises within a profession, the number of female undergraduates willing to major in the subject would also rise, so I suspect that a graph of the % of women in historically male professions chronologically from the point where women are first permitted to enter the profession would show that the growth rate is exponential. Or maybe j-curved, if the earliest adopters have very negative experiences which are made public – something we have seen in the media for many professions, including IT and the military.
How does the data correlate with graduation rates for each major? If only 25% of engineering majors graduate (I think that’s somewhere in the ballpark), and 70% of communications majors do, wouldn’t we expect the average IQ in the more selective field to be higher?
The IQ system of measuring intelligence is inherently biased towards quantitative reasoning and observation based data retention. It is, essentially, a measurement of how close you are to the idealized version of intelligence as dictated by the makers of the test, which is inherently biased against different forms of intelligence such as emotional intelligence, social intelligence, physical intelligence and creative intelligence. If you are trying to discern how smart someone is, a test should encapsulate all aspects of mental intelligence, not just number based reasoning.
Philosophy isn’t an “odd exception.” Philosophy is hardcore analytical training. Moreover, philosophy is the father of science, which was called “natural philosophy” until just the last ~200 years.
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We should clearly end women’s suffrage
None of this takes into account the actual number of people in each job. The majors that are closer to even, gender wise, skew lower than the trend would suggest. This data seems to show a correlation between IQ and major more so than IQ and gender. Lower IQ females gravitate towards certain majors, but that says nothing about where lower IQ males end up. They may be more spread out as males are encouraged to a wider variety of majors compared to women. Historically women are discouraged from entering Science, Math, Engineering, etc. majors. This results in only the most motivated and intelligent women pursuing these majors which skews that data higher. Nothing contained in this information indicates causality, just a random assortment of data.
HAHA WOW!! This is wild!
My current major is Pre-Engineering that’s 6 blasted semesters of MATHEMATICS!! 6 Physics classes, 4 chemistry classes 4 electrical engineering classes to name a few!!
” The higher the estimated IQ, the more quantitative the major (with Philosophy being an odd exception), and the less women enrolling in those majors. Many women tend to avoid mathematics due to social stigma, lack of exposure during childhood, etc., and this fact is ultimately reflected in their SAT performance.”
I do what I can to optimize myself. For the longest time I’ve had the wrong perceptions on math. In the past I dislike math only because I had poor self image in my own abilities to master mathematics and I didn’t have the motivation or support from my peers to enable me to be confident in mastering it.
Now my perception has changed I like that doing math problems creates new neural pathways and expands cognitive capabilities in the brain.
I came back to NYC to enroll @QCC to achieve my #1 goal: Improve my Metacognition in Mathematics. I’m doing so by obtaining my associates degree in Pre-Engineering.
Kudos for including R^2 values. But please please put them on the graphs. Don’t make me match them up later.
Basically all you’ve said here is that high achievers in math at age 16-17 go on to major in mathematical fields. Big whoop. Everyone already knows that boys do better on the SAT math.
Men and women have about the same average IQ.
However, they differ in the amount of within-sex variability in IQ scores. There are many more men than women at both the bottom and the top of the IQ score distributions. The greater proportion of men at the very high levels of IQ can explain the trend.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201101/how-can-there-still-be-sex-difference-even-when-there-is
@Randy Olsen
No, Mr. Olsen, a non-naive reader will conclude that women are inferior, because this result reconfirms what every man sees with his own eyes: Women are inferior and it shows in nearly every test result, whether IQ tests (women score 5 IQ point lower on the average), knowledge tests (women score even worse), income tests (self-employed women earn half as much as self-employed men) or car driving tests (women have 5.7 accidents per million miles, men only 5.1) and so on.
Nearly the only tests where women are better than men are tests that have to do with babies or cleaning, for example face recognition or sensitivity to smells.
I guess you added this statement about “naive readers” because you are afraid that in the current climate and the current degree of femastazation of academia it’s wiser to not point out politically incorrect facts. After all Lawrence Summers was fired for completely harmless remarks.
I’d have to see the distributions to make this definitive, but the tendency of men to greater variance could explain this pattern. A person with 110 IQ would probably struggle in math or physics. My guess is that a 130 IQ would be needed to feel comfortable in that territory – so how bad is the skew in the 130+ realm?
As for amelioration of math anxiety – several women have told me that Montessori-based approaches were much better than “traditional” approaches. I could say a lot about math instruction, but it would become tl;dr.