ABSTRACT
The first question that most people ask about sex-related cognitive differences is which is the smarter sex-males or females? Although this question has a long history, in the past few years, it once again has made its way into the popular press as a handful of researchers hotly debate the answer (Seligman, 1998). There are several ways to find answers to this question. One logical way is to obtain large random samples of women and men, give them a psychometrically sound intelligence test (one with good statistical properties), and compare the scores for women and men. The sex with the higher average score would be the smarter sex. Although this may seem like a logical, straightforward approach to answering the question of sex differences in intelligence, it won't work. Intelligence tests are carefully written so that there will be no average overall difference between men and women (Brody, 1992). During the construction of intelligence tests, any question that tends to be answered differently by males and females is either discarded or balanced with a question that favors the other sex. Therefore, average scores on intelligence tests cannot provide an answer to the sex differences question because of the way the tests are constructed.
