2 Women’s Intelligence & Gender Equality

Even Charles Darwin thought his theory of natural selection supported why women were inferior to men. In the late 1800s scholars measured women’s and men’s brains and determined women’s brains were smaller, thinking that proved their inferiority; and concluded, the reason for women’s being less intelligent.

Until there was a way to measure intelligence, there was no way to argue scientifically that women were not inferior, would not be able to have judgment or be smart enough to vote.  Thus prejudices and myths continued about women.  Therefore, it was revolutionary when Stanford Binet devised a measure of intelligence in France, 1905, originally to differentiate those children who would need special help in learning, yet he recognized intelligence was multidimensional.

Luella Winifred Pressey curious about gender differences replicated Binet’s results in the United States in 1918 by assessing 2,544 school children (aged eight to sixteen yrs) on a group scale of intelligence. Results revealed that the girls averaged slightly higher in general intelligence than the boys though this may be a result of girls’ earlier development. The comparative standing of the two sexes varied according to the nature of the test. The distribution of total scores showed a remarkably greater variability among boys than among girls.

Based on this psychological research, society could no longer deny that girls and women were equally intelligent to boys, enough to be educated to reach their full potentials.