[bakhy]

> ...possibly negative for women.

I hope I won't be downvoted crazy for this, but wasn't feminism offered as an answer to this? Better educated women have a bit more trouble having babies and keeping their career, since lots of men find it offputting to be dependent on their wives, due to traditional gender roles. Some developed countries have experienced normalization of fertility rates, and I've heard that more gender equality was a possible good explanation for this - more women can have both the baby and the career... This would also fit with the phenomenon you describe, of educated men having more kids, but educated women having less.

[soundwave106]

IMHO there are a lot of factors for this link and concluding negative dysgenic scenarios is probably hasty. It may not necessarily be "all bad", and it may not necessarily directly relate to intelligence per se.

Speculative: Infant mortality, for instance, is not much of a concern anymore in developed economies. Knowledge in the mean time is a far more valuable commodity than ever. In such an economy, it makes more sense to concentrate parenting resources (which include far more schooling than in earlier times) on a smaller set of offspring. I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing personally.

Also speculative: For women, the conflict between career and parenting is indeed very significant, especially in countries which do not seem to value work-life balance very much (inflexible work schedules, lack of priority on child services, etc.) and/or still have a lot of the traditional parenting roles in place. Motherhood has shown to be a significant explanation of the gender pay gap for instance. I would not be surprised if the negative penalty for fertility for intelligent women is largely due to this phenomenon as well. It would be interesting to see if this "intelligence penalty" for women does indeed lessen in countries with more family friendly employment policies.

[77pt77]

>since lots of men find it offputting to be dependent on their wives

Source please. It could very well be the other way around or more likely a mixture of both.

[watwut]

The ideology of male breadwinner is quite alive in more conservative and evangelical circles. Man living in such social group whose women earn more have lover social standing and consequently don't want it. Then there are people who don't care and I know of no groups that would believe in women being expected to he breadwinners.

So the bias would be toward that way.

[textor]

Ideology of independent working woman seems far more pronounced to me. We all are expected to work, which necessarily makes having children – especially early in life, when they have the highest chance to be healthy – a big bother for women, and feminism doesn't help here in the least, even if it slightly compensates for the issue of "ideology of male breadwinner".

[watwut]

"Ideology of independent working woman" is basically ideology of same expectation on men and women. It does not compensate anything, bias in who is expected to earn more goes other way. A single women does not need to earn more then non-existent husband to feel enough feminine.

[pokemongoaway]

It's men's fault that men aren't putting themselves into female roles that will guarantee for many of them divorce, no reproduction, no attraction from women? Such twisted logic! Why are we saying "men and women IQs" when this is way too general. It's the west that isn't reproducing at replacement rates, and then having lower IQ immigrants replace them. Please note the lack of value judgement on my part about IQ - a society is allowed to increase lower IQ populations, but don't act like it isn't happening.

[Emma_Goldman]

This is wrong in at least two respects.

1) X can be morally desirable and yet yield as a consequence effect Y, without thereby vitiating X. That is, the problem clearly isn't 'gender equality'. If you think there really is a problem - and I'm doubtful because it's more than offset by environmental factors - then it's on account of something else: the fact that women have to choose between work and home life, the anti-social work ethic forced upon everyone by capitalism, etc.

2) Some early feminists argued in favour of the pill because of its dysgenic potential. They believed it could be used to lower the birthrate of racial/class inferiors. 'Feminism' is an incredibly diverse ideology.