When Women Out Pace Men: Dysgenics?

[Ptolemy]

If one keeps an open mind, one will notice that females are greatly starting to out pace males. This is just an example here.

The Gender Gap: Boys Lagging

"[Girls] tend to dominate the landscape academically right now, even in math and science."

"The school's advanced placement classes, which admit only the most qualified students, are often 70 percent to 80 percent girls. This includes calculus. And in AP biology, there was not a single boy."

"Girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college, and graduate school, says Dr. Michael Thompson, a school psychologist who writes about the academic problems of boys in his book, "Raising Cain." He says that after decades of special attention, girls are soaring, while boys are stagnating."

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/31/60minutes/main527678.shtml

The Dawn of the New Female Warrior

"A study of more than 35,000 discount-brokerage customers by economists at the University of California at Davis found that between 1991 and 1997, women's portfolios earned, on average, 1.4 percentage points more a year than men's."

and
"(A) poll, conducted in fall by the National Association for the Self-Employed, shows that startups of women-owned businesses have grown by double digits annually from 2000-2003, significantly outpacing growth in the 1990s and outnumbering men-owned startups by nearly a 2-to-1 ratio in 2003."

for a further collections of articles on the subject:

www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/ti/2004/0106.html

[Melnorme]

It's clear that women can 'succeed' in modern society, but can they 'dominate'?

When women are a majority in university engineering faculties, I'll start worrying.

[Ptolemy]

Now I was reading somewhere that a good sign of dysgenics (the less intelligent outbreeding the more intelligent) is when females start to outperform males.

In downward breeding trends, male's IQ is more subject to fluctuation, and will start to fluctuate in a downward trend to lower than the average mean.

However, female's IQ tends to congregate around the mean average, meaning much less variation. Average female IQ will tend to remain higher than the average male IQ in downward trends.

In upward Eugenic trends(the more intelligent outbreeding the less intelligent), average female's IQ will remain constant as the male's IQ will fluctuate up to better highs.

Think of the black comunity, how black women are often smarter than black men.

Blacks have been practicing dysgenic breeding at a higher rate than whites/asians

[Ptolemy]

Then again, I can't find the source where I read this info, so I can't confirm it.

However, the above is not a concept I would think-up on my own.

In no way am I implying a eugenics program, however, I think the intelligent need to have their fair share of children, to help even out the less intelligent's tendency to over-reproduce.

As we all know the more intelligent might have one or two children while the less intelligent have three or four or even more in some parts of the world.

[Sandwich]

Ptolemy, were you reading this dysgenics stuff on the web or in a book, and was the source reputable ?

It sound fascinating if true, but the evidence would have to be very convincing. Is this K-factor stuff you're coming up with here? Presumably there would have to be some reason that reproductive success was linked to iq in males in different circumstances, everything from class correlation with number of offspring to how female sexual preference selection process works at different times and its changing relevance.

In the modern world, isn't the first hypothesis much more relevant than the second, since most people get the chance to produce surviving offspring?

Lots of different scenarios we could imagine.

Melnorme, if women really are getting brighter than men, why on earth would they want to join an engineering faculty?

I can live with the idea that women are outperforming men because they're better at achieving certain kinds of results. What I can't live with is the idea that I'm supposed to like their way of doing things. Have you noticed how bureaucratic and boring women-dominated business meetings are? How unplayful their academic thinking is?

[Melnorme]

Sandwich said:

Ptolemy, were you reading this dysgenics stuff on the web or in a book, and was the source reputable ?

Maybe it was neoeugenics.com

[captainusa1]

My guess is that this is a cultural thing. I doubt that gender or genetic differences are the main causes of this trend. Present society goes out of its way to encourage females, sometimes at the expense of males. This has to produce some kind of reaction in the psyches of boys IMHO, even if it's at a subconscious level.

[Ptolemy]

Melnorme said:

Maybe it was neoeugenics.com

No. I have browsed the site once, but I stick more to academic sources; Lynn or Rushton, and my interest is purely academic.

I don't subscribe to the racist eugenics view, because I feel all races can benefit and each has there own attributes and down falls. I actually like diversity.

[Sandwich]

I'm not sure that IQ comes into it at all, but I would have thought that the bizarre process whereby those in middle class professions are significantly out-bred by the less educated must have some effect on something in the medium term. What effect on what I'm not at all sure. It's a very old problem, as somebody noted in another thread, goes back to the Romans.

Psychological factors, anti-education "lad" culture, the way exams are structured, continuous assessment, etc are all said to contribute to the trend in exam results. The stuff about stockbroker's portfolios and business start-ups is new to me though and worrying, in a post-industrial society.

What are all these superceded men going to do? Sit around looking attractive for the women and occasionally have a truly original idea? Hmmm ... doesn't sound THAT bad.

By the way, is it established that there is a correlation between IQ and professional activity? Are doctors and lawyers better at abstraction (not passing University finals, abstraction) than barmen and buskers?

[Ptolemy]

Sandwich said:

What are all these superceded men going to do? Sit around looking attractive for the women and occasionally have a truly original idea? Hmmm ... doesn't sound THAT bad.

"Still, some researchers and college administrators believe that the shifting male-female balance on campus portends a seismic shift in the nation's social norms, with college-educated women having growing problems finding mates of equal educational footing."

""It is flat out an unhealthy social situation when the gender imbalance gets that bad," Mortenson said. "Already, the lack of marriable men is a hot topic of conversation among black women. They can't see it now, but that is going to happen for white women in the future. You don't create these marriageable men out of the blue at age 30 or 35.""

www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38887-2002Jun24?language=printer


Remember, a lot of women just don't settle. If they can't find a suitable mate, they just forgo marriage.

40% of black women never marry.

[Ptolemy]

Melnorme said:

Maybe it was neoeugenics.com

I must also add, I found that site vitriolically anti-semitic, and being a Greek, with possible Arab admixture (a DNA report is forth coming), I personally feel more of an affiliation with Semites (both Jews and Arabs) than with, say, a Nordic.

[Aria88]

I cannot say that women are less intelligent than men. I find, however, that women are simply not suited, as a rule, to play out the roles that men traditionally have. Occasionally, however, one may find an exceptional female who can take her place among men.

I was not born a misogynist. I truly tried not to be for the longest time, but life lessons have taught me otherwise. Call me unenlightened -- I care not.

Maybe the next generations of females will be better able to deal with modern society, careers and domesticity, but I am greatly disappointed, to put it delicately, in the present generation (20-40); thus my misogyny.

[eufrenio]

Ptolemy said:

Remember, a lot of women just don't settle. If they can't find a suitable mate, they just forgo marriage.

40% of black women never marry.

Maybe they don´t marry, but that doesn´t stop them from having kids. And they procreate with the wrong set of men hence the dysgenic effect.
It´s happening in the USA with Black women, and the trend seems to be spreading to other ethnicities and even countries.
I see that happening right now in Europe, where career women end up single, with the occasional kid they had with some lowlife.
Or worse still, they´ll adopt a child from a distant country, whose genetic make-up and overall fitness are entirely unpredictable.

[Katea]

Social psychologists tend to think that the lowering IQ of males (relative to females) is due to sociological effects of being raised in a single parent family (specifically, one lacking a father) - ie. the effects on young boys of not having a father figure.

The cause of the apparent IQ lowering is not genetic, its just more often associated with lower socioeconomic groups.

I can't remember the exact reference for this (I learned this a few years ago, & my reference notes are on the opposite side of the planet).

Bear in mind that IQ is affected by a combination of genetics and environment (genetics determines a potential IQ range, environment determines actual IQ).

[Sandwich]

Bear in mind that IQ is affected by a combination of genetics and environment (genetics determines a potential IQ range, environment determines actual IQ).

That's reasonably true. And your suggestion that boys need a father more than girls do to achieve their full potential is intuitively appealing. Is there any evidence to back it up though?

However, this trend is also noticeable in achievement of the top grade at school leaving exams, (although the top range in Britain has been increasingly broadened out so this may be a statistical artefact - more steady girls swamping the few exceptional boys who used to achieve these grades). The children of one-parent families of either sex would not be particularily well represented at this level.

And as to the stock-portfolios, well done girls, but I'll wait to see how long the trend persists, in a variety of markets.