The Natural Superiority of Women (35 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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securities analysis, the range of industries covered by womenonce limited to cosmetics, household products, textiles and appareltoday includes steel, small growth firms, engineering construction, gold mining, automobiles, quantitative analysis, and biotechnology. Janet Lewis suggested that women may have fared better in research than in other Wall Street fields because there success can come relatively quickly and be measured objectively, successes and failures are highly visible, and the work is less social, less competitive, and more individual.

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Women investment advisers and counselors have increasingly proved their mettle and earned the respect of their male competitors. Women continue to earn the respect of all their male competitors. A number of women have earned full partnerships in prestigious investment banking firms. In the middle levels of banking women have solidly established themselves in impressive numbers, and it is only a matter of time before they do so in top management positions.
In 1997, women held more than 10 percent of the total board seats of
Fortune
500 companies, fully 84 percent of
Fortune
500 companies had one or more women directors; 36 percent reported having two or more women directors. Companies with the highest percentage of women holding board seats (19-10%) included savings institutions, airlines, and computer software companies. The lowest percentages of women on the board were reported by the mail/package/freight delivery industry and the securities arena (3-5%).
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Statistics on women as business owners indicate that women are indeed making a substantial mark on America's economy. The more than eight million businesses owned by women contribute more than two trillion dollars annually into the economy, more than the gross domestic product of most countries. At the same time, employment growth in women-owned businesses exceeds the national average in most regions and industries. Interestingly, nearly three-quarters of the business owned by women in 1992 were in business three years later, compared with an average of two-thirds for U.S. firms in general.
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Today there is a genuine recognition that women constitute an important factor in the whole system of American business. The direction of women's development in the financial world has become quite clear.

 

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9
The Intelligence of the Sexes
A scientist does not set out to prove anything one way or the other; the scientist is interested in finding out what
is
and stating it. Perhaps it is this austere attitude toward the fate of the facts that has prevented scientists' findings concerning the intelligence of the sexes from becoming as widely known as they should be. What is found must be tested and checked by other independent scientists before it can be accepted.
In 1910 Helen Thompson Woolley, the first principal of Mount Holyoke College, in an article on test results wrote, ''There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where flagrant personal bias, logic martyred for the cause of supporting a prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even sentimental rot and drivel, have run riot to such an extent as here."

1
These frank remarks apply with even greater force to the findings relating to the thousands of so-called intelligence tests that have been administered since those words were written. The truth is that there can hardly be a field of science in which so many follies have been solemnly committed in the name of science, and so many unsound conclusions drawn on the basis of tests that do not in fact measure what it is claimed they measure. I wonder I never see Woolley's comments on intelligence tests quoted.

 

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The principal error committed by the intelligence testers has been the assumption that their tests yield a quantitative measure of the biological determination of intelligence. Evidence today reveals that these tests measure, if anything, the background of information of the testee, plus the combined effects of socioeconomic status and schooling combined with genetic factors passed through the alembic of a unique personality. While there is no known means of teasing out of this amalgam what is due to environmental factors and what is due to genes plus the individual history of the person, we do know that when the environmental factors are improved IQs go up, and that when they are depressed IQs go down.
Just as the broader significance of the sex chromosomes might have been understood much sooner if they had been discovered by a woman rather than by a man, so it may also be that because the basic work on intelligence testing was done by males (though it has since been very largely participated in by women) it was not considered necessary to do more than state the facts. But facts do not speak for themselves, and unless they are given a little assistance they have a difficult time getting established. In 1910 Helen Woolley listed less than half a dozen previous studies of psychological sex differences; today several thousand such studies are available. But it is one thing to report the findings set out in these studies, and quite another to say what they mean.

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Fortunately, there is fairly common agreement among scientists on the meaning of the facts. This preamble is necessary because the facts obtained by so-called intelligence tests and other tests do not speak for themselves; indeed, when they are assumed to be speaking for themselves it is almost certain that the grossest errors of inference have been committed because of the many concealed factors that have probably affected the results as reported. For example, when one compares the intelligence scores of elementary school boys and girls it is found that the girls do better, on average, than boys. On the other hand, the intelligence test scores for high school seniors are, on average, higher for boys than for girls. What is the meaning of these findings? Do they mean that boys develop a higher intelligence than girls when they enter high school years? On the face of the scores alone this might be the conclusion, but were it to be drawn it would be erroneous.

 

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The explanation is all in favor of the girls. In practically every high school in the land there is a much more rapid elimination of boys than girls. Boys whose schoolwork is unsatisfactory drop out of school and go to work, whereas girls tend to stay on. Furthermore, girls make a better adjustment to the school curriculum than do boys; the slower girls make much more of an effort to master their school problems, and generally manage to pass sufficiently well to stay in school, while boys under the same conditions tend to become frustrated and give up. But such facts should put us on guard against jumping to the conclusion that high school girls are thus proven to be more intelligent than boys, or rather that a sexual difference of a biologically determined nature is involved. It may be that such a factor is involved, but quite obviously, or perhaps not quite so obviously, certain social factors in the ways in which girls and boys are conditioned are also to be considered.
Where especially bright children have been selected for testing, another concealed factor may enter which works to the disadvantage of girls, namely, the effect of sex stereotypes on the teachers' judgments. Since girls are generally brighter than boys at school, a girl of high intelligence may simply be regarded as a good pupil, whereas a boy of similar intelligence may be judged as brilliant.
Allowing for this and similar concealed and selective errors in the interpretation of the results of intelligence tests, let us, before proceeding further, state what is to be understood by intelligence. Such a statement is not as easy to arrive at as one might think. There is probably not a single definition of intelligence in the psychological literature that would find agreement among authorities.
In defining intelligence, the concepts that occur most often in the writings of psychologists are the ability to deal with abstract symbols and relationships and the ability to adapt oneself to new situations. But these are obviously general definitions, for there are all sorts of abstract symbols, in mathematics, music, philosophy, logic, and so on. An individual may be excellent in one area of abstract symbols and poor in others. Adaptation to new situations will often depend upon a person's previous familiarity with the context of the new situation. A white man taken at random, however intelligent he might be in adapting

 

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himself to new situations in his home environment, would almost certainly behave less "intelligently" in situations completely new to him, say, in an indigenous culture. Indeed, such behavior has often been misattributed to lack of intelligence, whereas it is usually nothing more than a reflection of the cultural disorientation most of us exhibit in foreign surroundings. Therefore it should be clear that intelligence is very closely related to experience and that it can be defined only in relation to a distinctive cultural setting or environmental milieu.
Within our own cultural milieu, psychologists are generally agreed, intelligence in large part consists of verbal ability. But, of course, it is the quality of one's capacity for verbalization and linguistic development that is important in the evolution of intelligence. Here it may be noted that the way verbal thinking and language are organized appears to be dependent more exclusively on the left side of the brain in males, while in females both the left and the right sides appear to be involved. This may confer certain linguistic advantages upon the female compared with the male. Apropos of that, it is well known that females learn to speak foreign languages more quickly and accurately than males.
A short definition of intelligence is the ability to make the most appropriately successful response to the particular challenge. That involves thinking, which essentially is problem solving. A more detailed definition of intelligence is that given by Dr. George Stoddard in his book,
The Meaning of Intelligence .
Intelligence is the ability to undertake activities that are characterized by (1) difficulty, (2) complexity, (3) abstractness, (4) economy, (5) adaptiveness to a goal, (6) social value, and (7) the emergence of originals, and to maintain such activities under conditions that demand a concentration of energy and a resistance to emotional forces.

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Possibly the only one of the attributes in this definition that requires clarification is the emergence of originals. By this Stoddard means simply the capacity for the discovery of something new; and it is included in the definition of intelligence not because it is an inevitable outcome of high ratings in each of the other six attributes, but because of its special place at the upper end of any valid distribution of intelligence. To what extent

 

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