To be a genius it helps to have a suite of personality traits including very high openness, disagreeableness, and general non-conformism ("and yet it moves" mindset).
This combination of traits is rarer in women, it's multiplicative together with IQ, hence the very low incidence of female geniuses.
In addition, while female geniuses are celebrated post facto, society otherwise tends to punish or shun female non-conformism more than male non-conformism. This is something I only really groked a few years ago, but I think it's also a non-trivial effect.
One factor is that men are more likely to have and maintain a professional career than women. In Lewis Terman's lifelong study of a sample of 1500 kids who had a mean IQ of 150 on the stanford-binet test, around 40% of the women ended up as housewives.
Lmao, imagine some prodigious 160 IQ genius woman that could have cured cancer or sth but chose to cook and clean for her husband instead (kinda hot ngl)
One of the things you do have to remember is that a guy who spends 90 hours a week on his job into his mid-40s and actually achieves success can still have kids. A woman can't do that--she'll be in or close to menopause. So a lot of very bright women figure they'll take time out to have kids. That's obviously time away from whatever you're doing.
1. women have higher verbal intelligence than other types of intelligence and this verbal tilt has translated in many bestselling authors of the last 2 centuries being women. Genius in maths, hard sciences, computer science, philosophy etc require logic intelligence while genius in painting, architecture, engineering etc require visual intelligence and the people who have these types of intelligence as the highest component of their IQ are men.
This would explain different performance between sexes at all IQ levels, not only at genius level. By being verbally dominant women can be competent lawyers and teachers but not mechanics or programmers.
2. women are more risk averse and have higher conformity so they pick prestigious, well established careers but these have no low hanging fruits left. For example lots of the people who went into physics in early 20th C made huge discoveries and are now considered geniuses. At the time being a physicist was not a clear career path and they had to do it while working various jobs, famously einstein worked in the swiss patent office. Few women were interested in such a low status gamble back then so they missed the boom. Now there are lots of women in physics but the field has been stagnating since the 70's. I doubt any contemporary physicist will be deemed a genius by future generations.
This phenomenon goes on to this day. For example few women were into crypto or AI before these fields blew up so it was the men who were interested into these niche topics before they were cool who profited the most. Now when jobs are well paid and prestigious more women are joining in.
For the male female gap in g, there's multiple things behind this. 1. For Lynn's development mental theory is a reasonable one but there's some legitimate criticism(there's a 2 star review from Amazon with mostly good criticism), on methodological choices and study selection). Also the point on brain size differences is interesting and could explain part of the difference in adulthood(roughly two points if the relationship between IQ and brain volume increases to 0.30 from 0.143(10 year olds in ABCD, adjusted for body size, (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371695470_A_Genetic_Hypothesis_for_American_RaceEthnic_Differences_in_Mean_g_A_Reply_to_Warne_2021_with_Fifteen_New_Empirical_Tests_Using_the_ABCD_Dataset), this would explain a two point advantage). This increase has been supported from an older review in intelligence and the UK biobank results in adulthood. Going to MCGFA results the general picture is roughly no differences(https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1758029622527103203), but there's the issue of test selection potentially favouring no differences(discussed by Lynn 2017 and Kirkegaard, https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/06/hiding-sex-differences-not-a-myth/), which also somewhat supports the developmental theory. With the indifference of the indicator, the sex differences mainly being on specific abilities with MCGFA and batteries without this issue as well as never versions of the SB and Weschler showing similar gaps(see Alan Kaufmann response to Kirkegaard) the impact is unclear. I should also point out that chronometric tests show a significant male female gap as well. One final point is because of the relationship between the variance ratio and sex differences with a 3-5 IQ point gap the variance ratio would be roughly 1.5 or so(https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/understanding-greater-male-variability and an unpublished meta analysis found slightly less, but there was publication bias in favour of a greater result).
IQ is a factor that plays an important role in this although I would say men are also more nonconformist and reckless which are other variables to take in consideration
To be a genius it helps to have a suite of personality traits including very high openness, disagreeableness, and general non-conformism ("and yet it moves" mindset).
This combination of traits is rarer in women, it's multiplicative together with IQ, hence the very low incidence of female geniuses.
In addition, while female geniuses are celebrated post facto, society otherwise tends to punish or shun female non-conformism more than male non-conformism. This is something I only really groked a few years ago, but I think it's also a non-trivial effect.
One factor is that men are more likely to have and maintain a professional career than women. In Lewis Terman's lifelong study of a sample of 1500 kids who had a mean IQ of 150 on the stanford-binet test, around 40% of the women ended up as housewives.
https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1995-holahan-thegiftedgroupinlatermaturity.pdf
Lmao, imagine some prodigious 160 IQ genius woman that could have cured cancer or sth but chose to cook and clean for her husband instead (kinda hot ngl)
One of the things you do have to remember is that a guy who spends 90 hours a week on his job into his mid-40s and actually achieves success can still have kids. A woman can't do that--she'll be in or close to menopause. So a lot of very bright women figure they'll take time out to have kids. That's obviously time away from whatever you're doing.
2 possible explanations:
1. women have higher verbal intelligence than other types of intelligence and this verbal tilt has translated in many bestselling authors of the last 2 centuries being women. Genius in maths, hard sciences, computer science, philosophy etc require logic intelligence while genius in painting, architecture, engineering etc require visual intelligence and the people who have these types of intelligence as the highest component of their IQ are men.
This would explain different performance between sexes at all IQ levels, not only at genius level. By being verbally dominant women can be competent lawyers and teachers but not mechanics or programmers.
2. women are more risk averse and have higher conformity so they pick prestigious, well established careers but these have no low hanging fruits left. For example lots of the people who went into physics in early 20th C made huge discoveries and are now considered geniuses. At the time being a physicist was not a clear career path and they had to do it while working various jobs, famously einstein worked in the swiss patent office. Few women were interested in such a low status gamble back then so they missed the boom. Now there are lots of women in physics but the field has been stagnating since the 70's. I doubt any contemporary physicist will be deemed a genius by future generations.
This phenomenon goes on to this day. For example few women were into crypto or AI before these fields blew up so it was the men who were interested into these niche topics before they were cool who profited the most. Now when jobs are well paid and prestigious more women are joining in.
For the male female gap in g, there's multiple things behind this. 1. For Lynn's development mental theory is a reasonable one but there's some legitimate criticism(there's a 2 star review from Amazon with mostly good criticism), on methodological choices and study selection). Also the point on brain size differences is interesting and could explain part of the difference in adulthood(roughly two points if the relationship between IQ and brain volume increases to 0.30 from 0.143(10 year olds in ABCD, adjusted for body size, (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371695470_A_Genetic_Hypothesis_for_American_RaceEthnic_Differences_in_Mean_g_A_Reply_to_Warne_2021_with_Fifteen_New_Empirical_Tests_Using_the_ABCD_Dataset), this would explain a two point advantage). This increase has been supported from an older review in intelligence and the UK biobank results in adulthood. Going to MCGFA results the general picture is roughly no differences(https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1758029622527103203), but there's the issue of test selection potentially favouring no differences(discussed by Lynn 2017 and Kirkegaard, https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/06/hiding-sex-differences-not-a-myth/), which also somewhat supports the developmental theory. With the indifference of the indicator, the sex differences mainly being on specific abilities with MCGFA and batteries without this issue as well as never versions of the SB and Weschler showing similar gaps(see Alan Kaufmann response to Kirkegaard) the impact is unclear. I should also point out that chronometric tests show a significant male female gap as well. One final point is because of the relationship between the variance ratio and sex differences with a 3-5 IQ point gap the variance ratio would be roughly 1.5 or so(https://inquisitivebird.substack.com/p/understanding-greater-male-variability and an unpublished meta analysis found slightly less, but there was publication bias in favour of a greater result).
Sorry for not properly understanding this but shouldn't the 20x gap explain some 76% of the variation?
(I don't know how to calculate this so I asked GPT to do it, apologies if I got something wrong)
(87-50)/(98-50) is 77% but I would not calculate the odds that way
IQ is a factor that plays an important role in this although I would say men are also more nonconformist and reckless which are other variables to take in consideration