The Smarter Get Smarter Faster via more Gains via the Flynn Effect and Boy Geniuses Outnumber girls by only four to 1 now versus 13 to 1 decades ago

Researchers at Duke University in North Carolina published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, they describe how they sifted through nearly three decades of standardised tests administered to American high-school students to see what had been happening to the country’s brightest sparks.

They draw two conclusions.

1) The Flynn effect (which weighs on the “nurture” side of the scales because it describes how IQ scores in general have been rising over the decades) applies in particular to the brightest of the bright.

2) The historic difference between the brainiest men and women has vanished. (Men now outnumber women only 4 to 1 instead of 13 to 1 for the top 0.01% of test scores

The three researchers drew their data from Duke University’s Talent Identification Programme, TIP, which is designed to ferret out especially clever candidates early on: all the participants had scored in the top 5% of ability when confronted with exams designed for much older students. TIP, in turn, draws on three national exams: SAT, EXPLORE and ACT. Altogether, Dr Wai, Dr Putallaz and Dr Makel looked at data from 1.7m children. Those data spanned the years between 1981 and 2010.

In the general population boys are well known to do a bit better than girls in maths. Girls, in turn, edge out boys on tests of verbal reasoning. The result is similar overall IQ scores.

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