The Idea of a Peculiarly Female Intelligence: A Brief History of Bias Masked as Science

Abstract

Are women’s minds different from men’s? I distinguish three versions of the idea of a peculiarly female intelligence, each devised by men to explain and justify their superior social position. First, from Aristotle through to the nineteenth century, the difference was understood in terms of polarities, such as men’s abstract versus women’s concrete thought. The idea of intelligence as we know it from IQ tests—as a single, general ability largely independent of personality and moral character—did not exist. Instead, abilities such as abstract thought, considered alien to women, were seen as indispensable for grasping moral principles. Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Francis Galton replaced the polarities with a single continuous general intelligence (“natural ability”), which he believed was inherited by men and women. This second version granted women and men the same kind of intelligence, although women, on average, were believed to have less of it. In the early twentieth century, Louis Terman put an end to this view by eliminating particular items from the Stanford-Binet test so that the means of male and female intelligence were the same—otherwise, female means would in fact have been higher. In the striking absence of a theory distinguishing intelligence from personality, these discarded items then landed in a masculinity-femininity scale. A third version, promoted by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, once again attempted to defend male hegemony by asserting that women have lower variability in physical and mental traits. All three versions, including their refutations, serve(d) motives external to science, such as eugenics, feminism, and justification of women’s inferior role in society. I end by pointing out lessons (not yet) learned from history and outlining a research agenda that goes beyond polarities and IQ to study potential sex differences in intelligent decision processes.