I haven't been able to shake the feeling I got when my daughter said "I think men are smarter than

[Donald Ian Rankin]

73. I'd suggest teaching her about the difference between statistical and absolute claims.

Yes, it's entirely true that on most measures of mental abilities, men score higher than women *on average*.

So the statement "on average, men are smarter than women", while clumsy, is closer to being true than it is to being false.

But the intersex variation is tiny compared to the intrasex variation - on most tests, the difference in average will only be a few points, whereas the standard deviation for ... no, I'm realising as I type that this is probably pitching it too high for a child, isn't it.

What's a simpler, clearer way of explaining this... hmm.

I'm slightly embarrassed by how hard I'm finding it to come up with ways of discussing the issue without using words like "correlate" and "distribution". If your daughter is mathematically-minded, that's clearly the best way to do it, but if she isn't it's a bit harder.

"Sort of, but not really, and not by much. When you say "men are smarter than women", what you're literally saying is that "all men are smarter than all women - there is not one, woman, anywhere, who is as smart as any man". And that's obviously not true. It's true that, on average, men are very slightly smarter* than women, but there are lots of very smart women too."

Better yet, have a discussion about "thinking about things mathematically" with her before you have one about gender issues - being able to think in terms of correlations rather than absolutes makes it much easier to understand all sorts of things.


*I'm not even touching on the fact that intelligence isn't a single quality - there are lots of different things people use their minds to do, and while being good at those different things is usually strongly-correlated, the correlation isn't perfect. But there's an entire different discussion you could have with her about different kinds of "smartness" and lots of different ways of testing/measuring them, almost certainly including some in which women test higher on average than men.