Are Girls smarter than Boys or vice versa?

The Times of India ran a poll a couple of weeks ago which asked a simple question... Are girls smarter than boys? The next day, the poll results were in... 61 percent believed it to be true and that in my mind is a pretty clear majority.

My opinion on the matter is a bit ambivalent with a hint of indifference.

I honestly don’t care about the topic to the extent of having scientific studies conducted. In this day and age, suggesting men are smarter is by default an indication of stupidity, which is why the title of this post is in the form of a question as opposed to a declarative statement; a very smart move on my part thank you very much. I think it merits some discussion (mostly for entertainment purposes)

So where do we begin? The only reason why I’m writing this is because I HATE generalizations.
‘All Indians are smart.’

‘Americans are all stupid.’

They irk me and irritate me and force me to do something about them.

So let’s get something straight first. Women and Men are DIFFERENT. Biologically, developmentally and psychologically. Now for the studies. I’ve read quite a few in the last couple of days and I can’t decide which ones I agree with so ill let you decide for yourselves.

All studies agree that girls do better at school exams than boys. And most of them agree that boys do better in IQ tests by as much as 5%. So how do you decide which is the correct way to measure smartness? Relative quantity, smartness. What one person may consider as smart, another may not.

Why do girls do better than boys at school?

There are a number of theories doing the rounds. Some are pretty crack-pot.. some less so.

a) Thirty years ago, The US passed equal opportunity laws. Billions of dollars were spent on giving the girl child special attention and according to Dr. Michael Thompson, “Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school." He says that after decades of special attention, girls are soaring, while boys are stagnating.
“Girls are being told, 'Go for it, you can do it. Go for it, you can do it.' They are getting an immense amount of support,” he says. “Boys hear that the way to shine is athletically. And boys get a lot of mixed messages about what it means to be masculine and what it means to be a student. Does being a good student make you a real man? I don't think so… It is not cool.”

Hmm... Interesting theory but then how do you explain why it happens in India too? I mean, here female infanticide is a part of life. Here, girls are barely allowed to go to school. I should rephrase. In most of India, girls are still not treated on par with boys. So there is no question of too much attention. Then how do they do so well?

Could the opposite be true in the case of India? Poorer kids fail more often because they don’t have access to good books, good atmosphere and good private tuitions. Poorer girls drop out more often than boys because parents of these girls don’t really want them to go to school in the first place. Being a poor student is a good excuse to pull them out. Therefore, girls who’d have failed anyway end up dropping out. Of course, it is not just girls from poorer families who drop out more often, but I suspect the proportion is higher. Which is why I suppose the effect practically disappears when it comes to ICSE/CBSE, which are usually opted for by the middle class.

I am just theorizing here, all this has to be proved of course. It can be done by verifying dropout rates in earlier classes and pass rates by income. Geography plays an important role in this too. The overall pass percentage is usually higher in the cities than it is in the rural areas. And the proportion of women in rural schools is much lesser for obvious reasons. Therefore the pass percentage of girls gets inflated.

b) British-born researcher John Philippe Rushton who is the psychologist at University of Western Ontario reached his conclusion after scrutinising the results of university aptitude tests taken by 100,000 students aged 17 and 18 of both sexes. The study carried out by him concluded that men's IQs are almost four points higher than women's. This certainly doesn’t explain why girls do better at school. In response to that he said, “It looks like up until late adolescence, the females have the advantage over males because they mature faster, which masks the underlying difference.”

Although experts have accepted that men and women differ mentally, with males averaging higher on tests of 'spatial ability' and females higher on verbal tests, it was assumed the differences averaged out, leaving no difference in overall intelligence.

So to summarize, I am no closer to finding out the truth than anybody else out there. Frankly, I don’t care. What I did get while writing all this is that women and men are different. As in, they are good with different things. Their chemical makeup and the way that girls are raised, provide them with a better aptitude for Art, English, and Visual logic, and all similar right brained activities. Males are usually better at maths and sciences, and other such left brained activities. However, this does NOT preclude males being good at right brained activities or females being good at left brained activities. It's all a matter of what you were born with, and what you were taught as you were growing up.

I also understood that women mature faster than men and that makes them more responsible and committed while in school. You may find guys goofing around but girls are more serious in class. They also face less peer pressure if they do well than guys. So a lot of things add up and girls do better at school than guys do. Does that make them smarter? I don’t think so. Guys have higher IQ’s. Does that make them smarter? I doubt that too.