I’ve never really subscribed to the opinion that women are every bit as intelligent as men; for it presupposes the possibility of an actual difference in intelligence quotient, other than those occasioned by genetic accidents or the results of a particularly unhealthy lifestyle during and post gestation.

To import the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘’man is born free, but everywhere in chains’’, and one such chain is the belief (perhaps stemming from cursory research from an age when the access to education for the girl child, was itself debatable; once it extended beyond classes on basic bookkeeping and etiquette) that women are biologically less intelligent than men.

Irwing concluded his research in 2004 on the recognition of next to no biological difference between the intellectual capacities of both sexes.  Further research has simply expounded this to mean that men and women achieve the same intelligence quotient, utilizing different parts of the brain. As long as intellectual functionality remains the basis of measuring intelligence, there are no grounds for drawing a distinction without a difference.

It is believed that spatial skills are integral to success in STEM fields, and research (Linn & Petersen, 1985; Voyer et al., 1995) has shown that boys consistently outscore girls in the areas of reasoning through, understanding, and remembering the spatial relationship between objects; so there may be questions as to whether this does not, in itself, constitute a difference in IQ, but this is not the case at all, for spatial skills are improvable, just as a person can learn and practice a physical skill and get very good at it, so also can one develop spatial skills.

Of course, there are people who, by sheer accident of genetics, and the absolute randomness of being born in a society in which the average person has access to western education, excel at math or physics, or some other STEM-related field, not from training or depth-learning, but simply by being savants, are able to easily replicate or advance concepts that would ordinarily take years, but that’s one in ten thousand.  The everyday person (boy or girl) has to put in the work.

The volume of work anyone has to do to attain excellence is exponentially different on the basis of more than just technical intelligence; access to learning materials, an enabling environment and other factors do play a part. The one-in-ten-thousand is usually just one!

To cap it all, since women and men employ different parts of the brain to achieve the same intelligence quotient, where the former may have to dedicate time to developing spatial skills and just takes wing once they’re sufficiently developed, the latter may, even though having naturally fine-tuned spatial skills, instead have to work on rudimentary calculations. In the end, everyone with interest can get the job done!