[debacle]

I never said having more women in STEM would be a bad thing - having more people in STEM will always be a good thing, all things considered.

However your opinion that women are just as intelligent as men is not backed up by any statistics, and one of the best statistics we have for assessing intelligence, IQ, does not jive with your assertion.

[pwny]

Please do show us statistics though. I'm not saying you're wrong (I genuinely don't know) but you can't say other people don't have data to back their claims when you don't put any data forward yourself. Especially since you brought up the (controversial) argument, the burden of proof is on you.

[debacle]

Actually, since this is an Internet forum, the burden of proof is on neither of us and you may be taking things just a bit too seriously.

But if you can't be arsed to Google it, here you are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx

[pwny]

That wasn't so hard to avoid the guaranteed s*storm that would obviously emerge from claiming one sex was smarter than the other.

Also, taking discussions seriously is exactly the reason why I come to HN. I'm sure I'm not alone.

That being said, those two links where interesting although they left me with even more questions than when I began. On one hand it's claimed that

"The mean IQ scores between men and women vary little." then "gender differences tended to disappear on tests for which there was a male advantage and to magnify on tests for which there was a female advantage" then "These tests have been complied over the years so there is no sex difference." but then oops, "some researchers have concluded that men have slightly higher IQ scores than women"

I'll blame that on Wikipedia I guess.

To be fair, the research of the second link seemed a lot more serious. I'm no IQ scientist so I won't try to guess things I don't fully understand but it was a good read.

[a_bonobo]

I agree with pwny - the little research there is on sex differences in IQ shows a VERY marginal difference, like the second link from above (http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/SexDifferences.aspx) says:

>It finds that females have a 101.41 mean IQ with a 13.55 standard deviation versus males that have a 103.08 mean IQ with a 14.54 standard deviation

A difference of 2 IQ-points is marginal anyway, but both populations (in this study) have different standard deviations (so the measurements spread out differently), which makes them harder to compare. In the end I'd say, the difference (in this study) is minimal and can be neglected. Edit: I also think that just by repeating the same study with exactly the same participants, the difference will be smaller, non-existant, or women will have a higher IQ. I once did (caution: anecdotal evidence) five IQ-tests on five following days and the results were off by +/- 5 points, just because I was more tired/more awake on the different days.

All in all I'm disappointed by the level of discussion in this whole thread, way to show the world that software-people have no clue of gender-differences.