[ectoplasm]

There's a 60/40 male/female split in that graph for people with IQ's of 140. First, you don't need an IQ of 140 to have a high-status position. Second, the male/female ratio for high-status positions is much higher than 60/40.

[blfr]

If OP's explanation of this difference is correct then you would expect (at least some) other mental traits to also have a higher variance in men. It wouldn't be just IQ.

[ectoplasm]

Just guessing of course, but I'd say testosterone is probably responsible for a good number of men filling high-status positions, see the sources on this page for effects on behavior:

https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/5740/are-there-re...

That said, I think we haven't quite reached the point where we can rule out hegemony when it comes to imbalance in general.

[saalweachter]

20% of Congresspeople and 5% of CEOs are women; to explain that, you would need 3 independent traits (ie, no correlation between traits) with a 40/60 split strongly tied to Congresspeople (ie, everyone who is a Congressperson shares this trait) and 7 for businesspeople.

You could go the other way and assume that it is all explained by a single trait -- give Congresspeople an IQ of 150, CEOs 160, and just assume that the trend in the chart continues and the overrepresentation of males is even higher at the further extremes.

This, however, runs into the problem that we've measured the IQs of Congresspeople and CEOs. Congresspeople are starkly average, with Representatives averaging 101 and Senators 98, so unless you believe that half of Congresspeople are below 50 and half above 150, the expectation based on this research is that more than half of Congresspeople should be women. Likewise, CEOs only average -- optimistically -- 130, where the gender split is only 46/54.

[sanxiyn]

Yes, it is a partial explanation.

[dagw]

Only if you can show a strong causation (or even just correlation) between very high intelligence and holding a high status position

[Tuisto]

Not hard. http://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2013-kell.pdf

[dagw]

That only really shows a general strong positive correlation between some measures of intelligence and some measures of success. It doesn't really say anything about if small fluctuations in the extremely high end of intelligence has a noticeable effect.

We're assuming that men dominate the tails of the intelligence distribution. So the real question is, does being in the top 1-2 percentile make you much more likely to succeed in so called high-status positions compared to 'only' being in the top 5-7 percentile.