Sunday, November 8, 2009

IQ tests for women

I read something the other day about IQ tests which puzzled me. Apparently the feminista and multi cultural mob are complaining that IQ tests are bias towards giving good results, or better results for middle age Anglo Saxon males.
Of course the Internet has opened up many things to people of all nations. After pornography and shopping the next most popular regular use of the internet is genealogy and apparently at some stage everyone has a go at one of the multitude of sites offering all types of on-line tests.
These seem to include personality tests, relationship tests, aptitude tests, career tests and IQ tests.
IQ tests measure intelligence which is of course quite a wide, all encompassing term while at the same time being sufficiently vague to be open to interpretation. My own understanding of what is measured by these tests is logic, analytical reasoning, spacial awareness, some general knowledge and a spattering of common sense.
Apparently women taking these tests (and interestingly black people) get on average results which are lower than those of men of similar ages and backgrounds. Therefore to demonstrate their logical reasoning some women conclude that the tests must be flawed in some way and bias towards giving better results for men. There can be no other answer.
I had a look at some of these tests on-line, many seem to be so trite as to be ridiculous, many seem pre-destined to give you a genius score if you just pay $X towards getting a certificate but some of them seem to be reasonable tests with no apparent ulterior motive. I was quite happy with my score actually although there was a variation of 2-3% on some of the results. The ones I did the poorest at were the ones that had diagrams and pictures and you had to predict the next diagram or pattern in a sequence, don't know why but I'm just not very good at these for some reason, however it would be quite narcissistic of me to deride these tests because I didn't do so well at them. When completing the 12 tests I took I was careful to look out for any apparent "gender bias." Obviously if a test had questions on football or fishing or cars this could be construed as some sort of bias. I didn't notice anything of the sort though. One thing that puzzled me however was that nearly all these tests (and all the American ones)had a question secreted somewhere in the middle asking which sex I was. The question was a bit touchy feely, along the lines of "it would really help us ensure these tests are fair if you tell us which sex you are" but I ticked the box as requested.
I wondered if this was something to do with the gender bias referred to. It did seem a bit blatant though, along the lies of "if you're a woman we'll reduce your mark" and even the most misogynistic of men would have to admit that this was unfair.
I then read, but have yet to actually try this that if you give exactly the same aswers but say you are female your score will be on average 6% higher tha for a make.
Whatever can this mean?

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