What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [85]
Spatial, math, and verbal abilities. In addition to the clear personality and social-behavior differences between males and females, there are ability differences. The huge amount of information about scholastic ability has yielded three generalities upon which all investigators agree:
Males are better at spatial and math tasks.
Females are better at emotional tasks and, perhaps, at verbal tasks.
There are more males with extreme (very low or very high) scores.
There have been at least two hundred studies of sex differences in these three basic components of “intelligence.” The spatial score derives from rotating three-dimensional objects mentally, and the like; the math score from arithmetic, algebra, and geometry; the verbal score from vocabulary, analogies, and reading comprehension. There is near unanimity about spatial and math scores: Males do better on average, but the difference is only moderate. To calibrate what a “moderate” difference is, assume that to become an engineer you should rank in the top 5 percent of spatial ability. The scores show that 7.4 percent of men and 3.2 percent of women rank this high. This means that there should be about two male engineers for every female engineer in the real world. The actual ratio is twenty to one.25
Females might be better than males on verbal tests. Based on 165 recent studies, there is a small but fairly consistent difference. Twenty years ago, there was a clear female advantage, but based on recent SATs, males have closed the gap.
On average, females are clearly better at emotional problems than males are. They judge emotion in the face more accurately, they decode nonverbal cues better, they recognize faces better, and they express emotion with nonverbals better. They also have more expressive faces. All of these differences are moderate in degree (the degree is somewhat bigger than that between males and females in spatial abilities). You should keep in mind that even the largest sex differences in ability are smaller than the average height difference between the sexes. Those who believe that the superior math and spatial scores of men suggest that men should dominate engineering and science must be prepared to accept the reverse argument for psychiatry, psychology, and personnel management.26
Perhaps the most intriguing difference between the abilities of men and women is a subtle but, I believe, important one. Usually, when scholars compare ability differences, they look at average differences: for example, the average woman is better than the average man at decoding emotion. For the most part, average sex differences are not large. How about the extremes, however? If you want to know who is likely to be very good or very bad—a great scientist or a great poet or a violent criminal or a person profoundly retarded—average differences won’t tell you. Extreme scores will, and there is a startling difference between the sexes in extreme scores. The ability scores of men tend to lie at the extremes more often than do the scores of women. The distribution of ability scores is bell-shaped for both sexes, but the women’s scores bunch up in the middle, while the men’s scores spread out with long tails at each end. Put another way, the average score for reading comprehension on the California Achievement Test, for example, is quite similar for girls and boys, with a small female advantage. But if you look way out in the tails, there are many times the number of boys at both ends.27
People often puzzle over why there are so many more men who are math geniuses, CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, champion chess players, great violinists, and world-class chefs. The answer may be that there are more men at the extremely high end of the relevant skill distribution. When we wonder why there are so many more retarded