On the Intellectual Capacity of Women

Revisiting David Stove's Infamous Essay

One of the dispiriting things about our enfeebled era is the inability of people to state obvious things that everyone knows are true. Many on the Alternative Right seem content to voice the unpopular truths about genetic links to intelligence, or statistical racial differences. A far more radical and obvious unpopular truth is that men and women are different.

I maintain that the deliberate denial of sexual dimorphism has had a larger impact on Western civilization than any other modern cultural delusion. Men and women have different psychological makeups, different athletic abilities, different aspirations, different physiology, different emotional reactions, much different reproductive functions, different consumer habits, and different capacities for rational thought and intellectual productivity. No civilization in all of human history has thought otherwise; ours is the first one to come up with something as obviously wrong as the Blank Slate theory. Human societies have survived all of the other kinds of dribbling lunacy the West presently self-immolates in. Many cultures have managed to survive for hundreds of years with multiculturalism, debasement of currencies, religious upheaval, widespread debt, usurious taxation and massive immigration and population transfer -- in some cases, even worse than we have today. None has ever thought to question sexual dimorphism, because the ancients were never that stupid.

Taking a very pedestrian example from current events, consider the dearth of women in physics and engineering. Academia, being what it is, considers this evidence of a vast world-wide conspiracy of invisible men who are diabolically conspiring to keep women from succeeding in the hard sciences. If you're a working academic in one of these fields, you will engage in ritual Maoist witch hunts, looking for sexist oppressors. There is approximately zero evidence for this conspiracy theory, yet it is unquestioned by hard nosed savants who allegedly fear no ghosts. Some of these true believers doubtless understand the concepts of "mean" and "standard deviation," and may even be aware of the fact that men have both a higher mean intelligence, and a much higher standard deviation in intelligence distribution; in particular in the areas of intelligence which pertain to these professions. With these two facts, the conspiracy theory evaporates: there are more male scientists and engineers because there are more males who are capable of doing the work. Virtually nobody is willing to say this, despite it being completely obvious to anyone not equipped with an academic sinecure.

For those of us who prefer not to think out details of Gaussian distributions, we have the late, great, Australian philosopher of science, David Stove. His essay on the subject should be read in its entirety by all fans of truth and common sense.

I believe that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men. By "on the whole," I do not mean just "on the average"; though I do mean that much. My belief is, if you take any degree of intellectual capacity which is above average for the human race, as a whole, then a possessor of that degree of intellectual capacity is a good deal more likely to be man than a woman.
This proposition is consistent, of course, with there being women, and indeed with there being any number of women, at any level of intellectual capacity however high. But it does mean, for example, that if there is a large number of women at a given above average level of intellectual capacity, then there is an even larger number of men at that level.

In the past almost everyone, whether man or woman, learned or unlearned, believed the intellectual capacity of women to be inferior to that of men. Even now this is, I think, the belief of most people in most parts of the world. In this article my main object is simply to remind the reader of what the evidence is, and always was, for this old belief, and of how strong that evidence is. An opposite belief has become widely current in the last few years, in societies like our own: the belief that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole equal to that of men. If I could, I would discuss here the reasons for the sudden adoption by many people of this opinion. But I cannot, because I have not been able to find any reasons for it, as distinct from causes of it. The equality-theory (as I will call it) is not embraced on the grounds of any startling facts which have only lately come to light. It is not embraced on the grounds of some old familiar facts which have been misunderstood until lately. It is not embraced, as far as I can see, on any grounds at all, but from mere prejudice and passion. If you ask people, "What evidence is there for the equality-theory?", you do not get an answer (though you are likely to get other things).

Rather, the question is felt to be somehow improper, morally or intellectually, and is thought not to deserve any answer.

.....

The evidence for the inferior intellectual capacity of women is so obvious and overwhelming, that anyone who can lightly set it aside must be defective in their attitude to evidence; and our contemporary equality-theorists are in fact (as I have hinted several times), religious rather than rational in their attitude to evidence. As providing some further indication of this, the following thought-experiment may be of use. Suppose that the historical evidence had been the exact reverse of what it has usually been: that is, suppose that the intellectual performance of men had been uniformly inferior, under the widest variety of circumstances, to that of women. Rational people would in that case be as confident of the superior intellectual capacity of women as they now are of the reverse. But would those people who are at present equality-theorists be as confident then as they are now of the equal intellectual capacity of the two sexes? To ask this question is to answer it. The fact is, our egalitarians treat evidence on a basis of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose; indeed, to say so is "putting it mild," at that.

I occasionally wonder at how we've reached this level of cultural madness that educated people are now required to believe that there is some vast international male conspiracy designed to keep women away from ... what amounts to a really lousy job. "The international male conspiracy" is also not a very good theory for the lack of noteworthy female entrepreneurs. I can think of only one female entrepreneur who succeeded in making a meaningful contribution, and most of you never heard of her, because there are hundreds of male entrepreneurs who created more important companies than she did. I don't think the "international male conspiracy" is the reason why the female world record for the deadlift in these days of widespread steroid abuse is only 500lbs; an accomplishment any healthy young male can do with a few years worth of training and beefsteaks.

In 1000 years, a more enlightened civilization may wonder at our vast social experiment with attempting to abolish sexual dimorphism. Will this be seen as the glorious liberation that we tell ourselves it is today? Or will it be seen as something akin to attempting to teach all dogs to walk on their hind legs, just because some of them are physiologically capable of it? This is a question which needs answering, and I'd prefer it be answered by something other than total civilizational collapse. The only Westerners who seem to notice the importance of sexual dimorphism aloud are libertines, one or two white nationalist thought criminals, and the occasional HBD enthusiast. I think it is well beyond time for people to have a rational conversation about this without fear of being hectored by grouchy man-jawed harridans, or whatever it is which has made people this silly.