James Flynn will be publishing a book in September entitled ‘Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century.’ As part of the book Flynn highlights that in some regions studies show women are achieving higher scores than men on IQ tests. British Mensa’s Supervisory Psychologist, Dr. Maria Leitner, has seen a copy of the book; you can read her thoughts below.

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“Flynn’s most recent contribution to the IQ debate is a timely and lucid addition to his oeuvre. He explores apparent anomalies in the interpretation of cross-sectional and longitudinal patterns in IQ scores within and between key population sub-groups. In doing so, he clearly explicates the underlying mathematics of IQ testing, providing a novel and, indeed, essential guide to IQ for the non-statistician. His interpretation of an apparent gender gap in IQ and recent ‘upward trends’ for females relative to males provides a particularly clear account of pitfalls in interpretation which can and do trip up the unwary.

“Flynn is often misinterpreted as stating that there have been real absolute gains in IQ over time. As he clarifies in his discussions here, this is in fact only one interpretation of the data and, perhaps, even the least plausible explanation. IQ tests are a relative not an absolute measure of an underlying characteristic we have called ‘intelligence’ (that is, we can place one individual in a rank order against others, but the IQ score itself, as with Douglas Adam’s ‘the answer is 42, is meaningless).

"Amongst many other factors, the interpretation of IQ scores requires an understanding of the social and environmental characteristics of the populations being measured; the creation and norming of the test items; the nature of the data collected to support the interpretation of the IQ scores achieved and a clear understanding of the mathematics involved in reaching the ‘final score’ for an individual or population. Putting this in the context of the apparent gender ‘differences’ and gender ‘gains’ Flynn explores, both the relative difference between males and females (with females having a ‘lower’ average IQ) and the apparent recent relative ‘gain’ of females over males (with female IQ scores ‘increasing’ more rapidly than males) can be seen either as a ‘real’ phenomenon or as an interpretive anomaly depending on one’s perspective.

“By way of example, as Flynn points out, both interpretations are reliant on the faith we have in the data collected to support our viewpoint (primarily data on University students, which are not representative of the general population and which incorporate a host of other effects including the impact of ‘glass ceilings’ on females and resistance to formal education on males); known differences in population patterns (females tend to show more ‘consistency’ and hence less extreme values in scores across a range of characteristics including IQ, making the comparison of mean scores a less informative value to compare than would otherwise be the case) and an understanding of changes in social and environmental characteristics across time which may account for longitudinal variation in IQ (for example, changes in access to formal education which may differentiate the opportunities provided to females now and females in previous generations).

“What’s more, these are only a few examples of the factors which need to be taken into account in interpreting the meaning of differences in IQ. So, are the differences between female and male IQs which Flynn cites ‘real’? Read the book and you will have an excellent grounding in why we cannot quite answer this one yet – enjoy the debate!”
Dr. Maria Leitner, July 2012