[extropy-chat] Harvard president criticized over comments

[Keith Henson]

At 01:37 PM 18/01/05 -0800, Mike Lorrey wrote:

>--- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:
> >
> > Great mathemeticians of either gender are
> > extraordinarily rare, to the point that conclusions
> > based on the distribution seem unreliable due to the
> > small sample size.
>
>Really? What is the distribution of gender to IQ?

I don't have time right now to find the reference, but my memory of gender 
vs IQ is that while the centers of the distributions are just about 
identical, the spread for men is a significant fraction of a standard 
distribution wider than that for women.

You would expect this because of the XX XY human sex determination, but I 
seem to remember that the amount was judged to be higher than could be 
accounted for by the genetics.

For most purposes, the wider distribution doesn't have much effect.  But 
when you are looking at the population of those out more than 6 standards 
from the center (both directions) they are something like 80% plus male.

Keith Henson