Are Men Better Inventors?

February is Black History month and this poster is making the rounds on social media.

Before you keep scrolling, take a look at the list carefully.  Do you notice anything about this list? They are all black inventors, but did you notice anything else in common? Take a few minutes if you're not sure. I can wait.









They are mostly men. Women make up roughly half of the population so why the gender disparity when it comes to inventions? It's not even a slight majority of men or any other number near half of that list. Only 3 of the 53 black inventors are women. 

It's been often remarked that everything that we enjoy in the world--everything that benefits us and makes our lives better--is due to the work of men.  This goes far beyond inventions and discoveries.  Explorers were predominantly men.  Soldiers were predominantly men. Rulers were predominantly men.  So were poets, artists and philosophers.  Things today that we take for granted are done mostly by men: plumbing, construction, waste management, distribution of goods, etc.  Even things we don't really notice because it's difficult to imagine the world organized any other way are developments brought forth by men such as economies, bureaucracies, government, military organizations, and the scientific method.  All of this has been brought forth by men.

Wishful Thinking

At this point, a rabid feminist will interrupt the dialog by claiming that women could have just as easily accomplished these things if they weren't oppressed and chained to their stoves the whole time throughout history.  Well, what about the poster?  Black people were an oppressed class for much of America's history, and yet, they still managed to invent things.

First, even if true, I would expect that these oppressed women, while chained to their stove, could still invent a better stove or develop a logically coherent philosophy (which would only require pen and paper), but we have no historical record of this.  And it's not due to "The Patriarchy©" or men stealing the women's ideas and inventions.  Rosalind Franklin eventually got credit for playing a crucial role in discovering the structure of DNA. Also, despite attempts to literally obliterate Hatsheput from Egyptian history, historians were still able to piece together who she was and what she did as Pharaoh.

Yes, there are many gaps in the historical record.  So we can't rely on this as evidence that women haven't invented many things?  I disagree.  How about we consider a couple of modern-day examples.

Aviation

It's interesting that when a woman accomplishes something in a male dominated field, it tends to be hyped more than if a man accomplished it.

Let's consider Amelia Earhart.  You know who she is, right?

She was the first woman to conduct a transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to  Northern Ireland in 1932 using a Lockheed Vega 5B.

The Lockheed Vega 5B

The flight earned her a nickname of Lady Lindy.  Why?  Because a man named Charles Lindbergh completed a longer transatlantic flight from New York to Paris 5 years earlier in 1927 using a custom built, single engine airplane called the Spirit of St. Louis.

The Spirit of St Louis

Lindbergh gets recognition because his flight was between the mainland US and Europe.  But there was an earlier transatlantic flight that was truly death-defying!

Thirteen years prior to Earhart's flight, in 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown also flew from Newfoundland to Ireland using a WWI era bomber.  Here's a photo of the plane that they flew.

Alcock and Brown nearly died.  They were in an open cockpit and had to cope with ice, northerly winds and fog.  One of them had to repeatedly crawl out onto the wings in mid flight to chip ice off of the engines.  Here's a photo after they landed in Ireland.

Apparently you don't have to stick the landing.  As long as you can walk away, it counts!

These flights I'm describing are transatlantic flights.  The first plane to fly around the world  was piloted by Wiley Post and Harold Gatty in 1931.  Here is the aircraft they used called the Winnie Mae.

If you think it looks a lot like Earhart's plane it's because it is.  You're looking at another Lockheed Vega!

So let me recap this historical digression for the slow people.  Earhart's achievement came 5 years after Lindbergh's record-setting flight using the same plane that two men used to fly around the world one year prior!  Earhart's achievement was all feminist hype and she gets my nomination for being the most overrated figure in history.

I picked aviation because early in it's history it was an extremely dangerous endeavor.  I pointed out the successful high points but many people lost their lives trying to push aviation limits.  People were still trying to figure out the technology and discover what technology was needed and which designs worked best.

Finally, one puzzling thing about aviation history is that there were female pilots during this time; pilots that were a lot better and more competent than Earhart.  Yet, if I asked 1000 people nobody would be able to name one other female pilot from this era besides Earhart. So it's obvious that there was no evil patriarchy keeping women from flying planes.  My first question is why none of these female pilots attempted a transatlantic flight?  Or even a flight around the world?  Second, why did the feminists tap Earhart for the trip instead of a more competent pilot who can live up to the hype?

Facebook

Facebook is an interesting example because most of us can still remember a time when the internet didn't exist.  It wasn't that long ago which means that certainly by this time women were already fully indoctrinated into believing that they can do anything men can do (even better than men can do) while going into STEM fields to cheers of you go grrrll--which would include computer programming.

Then the internet was born (developed my men), including the establishment of the necessary infrastructure (developed by men), the hardware (developed by men), the HTML and browser software (developed by men) and the services that allow us to access it (developed by men).

Where were you ladies during all this?

Then Mark Zuckerberg creates Facebook with a couple of friends in his college dorm room while attending Harvard as an undergrad.  A lot of technical pursuits in the modern day live or die based on funding, but that is the beauty of Facebook.  It required no start up costs beyond the nominal investment of a computer plus some programming knowledge and skill--skills that Zuckerberg cultivated at a very early age.

Feminists like to complain that institutionalized sexism or male privilege is discouraging or thwarting women's careers and ambitions, but none of this would have gotten in a girl's way of creating Facebook.  You simply sit at a computer and do it.

Oh, you need skills also, and knowledge about how the internet works beyond using your mouse and remembering your passwords.  I find it hard to believe that schools were keeping women out of computer classes.  Even if they did, the internet was already established with some areas of the world wide web offering free tutorials and literature on writing HTML.  The requisite knowledge was easily accessible and available.

So I ask again, "Where were you ladies during all this?"

 

It's Not About Ability

Don't misunderstand me.  There are many women who do quite well in STEM fields, especially when a particular field has already been developed and mature.  So my examples aren't meant to be an assertion that women can't do anything or that they are incompetent.  Certainly, men fall on a broad spectrum of ability as well.  Not every man can be a pilot to fly around the world or a computer wiz to invent Facebook.

The point of my historical digression is that there is no patriarchy or oppression that is keeping women from becoming inventors.  Our poster of black inventors even includes three women.  When I talk about invention, I'm not discussing the ability to learn or perform highly technical tasks.  History and our modern age has demonstrated that women are capable of doing this (individual results will vary, just like with men). When I talk about invention, I'm talking about origins--it could be a machine, a physical object, a political system or philosophy. There seems to be something in the nature of men that allow them to visualize things that don't yet exist and find the means to bring that vision into reality. The ability to invent, for better or for worse, seems to be a masculine trait.

Even if Earhart was a good pilot, it still took two men to invent the airplane and bring it into existence to begin with (the Wright Brothers).  Also, as much as we laude Sheryl Sandberg for becoming the COO of Facebook, both the website and the company were invented and developed by Mark Zuckerberg.

This is only a blog post but any careful contemplation of the past 10,000 years of documented human history shows that female subjugation by males is a myth.  If there is any burden or enslavement placed on women, it is from nature itself and not the work of men. In fact as civilization progressed, man's ingenuity has succeeded in subduing his environment, eliminating threats and raising the quality of life to the point that female intellectualism should have flourished if it had existed in equal capacity to a man, but it's noticeably absent or of diminished character instead.

The question is why?  Why is it like this?

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

The ability to invent would seem to be rooted in somebody's intelligence in some fashion.  The ability to think creatively and logically seems critical to this.  So it would seem IQ would be a good way to measure tendencies of people and populations to invent.  Discussions involving IQ are more complicated than they appear.  There is a lot of discussion about different types of intelligence and whether or not the tests that are designed actually measures intelligence accurately. However, IQ is a good proxy for this discussion and its what most people are familiar with when discussing intelligence.

Nevertheless, IQ doesn't measure raw intelligence absolutely.  It's a normalized aggregate. The Flynn Effect describes the phenomenon that average IQ among various populations around the world has steadily increased over the past century.  Given enough time, we'll all be geniuses which would be absurd.  So IQ scores get updated periodically and test results get normalized based on how well a test subject did in comparison to a group of other people who took the same test. The average IQ score is automatically adjusted to 100, if your score lands more than two standard deviations away from this average (about 130), then you're considered gifted and can join Mensa if you wanted.  A score lower than two standard deviations (about 70) makes you mentally retarded and you may have trouble performing some tasks that require a high level of cognition.

Likewise, average IQ of men and women are both normalized to be 100.  It is assumed that men and women, on average, are of equal intelligence, but this is debatable.  For example, it's often observed that women do better at verbal portions of the test where men do better at spacial recognition, but in the aggregate these complementary differences wash out so the average, normalized intelligence (the hump or the bell curve) might not tell us much about why men may be better inventors.

To get a true indication of why men may make better inventors, we may need to look at extremes--the tail end of the curve.  We have a lot of data on IQ testing.  When you plot out IQ scores by gender you get curves that look like this.

from Quora.com

The differences of the curves are exaggerated for effect in this diagram, but scholars have noted that men tend to outnumber women at the extreme far ends of the curves--both at high intelligence and low intelligence.  In fact the further down you go on the curves, the greater the gender disparity in favor of men.  This would seem to make sense.  It explains why most of our inventors and nobel prize winners are men while most of our prisons and special education classes are also full of men.  Women, on the other hand, are over-represented in the center of the curve--they cluster around the average IQ of 100.

The IQ scores also shed some additional insight.  As I already noted.  IQ is an aggregate of several types of intelligence.  Initially, it would seem that spacial recognition and logical deduction would be required to make better inventors, and men do excel in this generally speaking, but inventors are rare.  We should be seeing a lot more inventors if this was true.  In order to score higher on the IQ test a person needs to master other forms of intelligence that scientists try to measure, including verbal intelligence which women tend to do well on.

If creativity is required to make an inventor (it makes sense to me), then creativity would entail drawing from as broad a base of knowledge and experience as possible and try to recombine them or restructure them differently to create something new.  So it would seem that one would need to master a plethora of cognitive skills and not specialize too much in order to make a good inventor.  Generally speaking, men seem to be born in a better position to accomplish this.

This is also why I find the feminist argument for the historical oppression of women to explain the disparity of inventors so vacuous.  True genius and resourcefulness can't be suppressed--not for long.  It will always overcome obstacles in its way.  This is invention by definition.  But for thousands of years of recorded history we don't see this with many women.  We see women eventually participate in rolls and in fields with men, like Amelia Earhart or Sheryl Sandberg, but we always see that men were at all the groundbreaking events in history.

Invention Correlates With Test Scores

If you're still not convinced that high IQ tends to make inventors, then consider a recent meta-analysis done by Jonathan Wei from Duke University.  After analyzing millions of test scores over several decades he found that there was a strong link between how well college students did on standardized testing and what college majors they ended up completing.  Students that scored the highest tended to be enrolled in STEM majors at college.  The meta-analysis included many different standardized tests such as the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

And the Graduate Record Examination (GRE)

The differences in test scores between majors or fields of study don't seem very large, but when you consider a sample of size of millions, the differences are significant.  Read the study yourself but it seems like students that consistently scored the highest on standardized tests end up majoring in STEM fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences.  These are fields where invention and discovery seems most likely to occur.  As already noted, men tend to achieve the highest scores in these types of tests.  They also seem to enter STEM fields in greater numbers than women.

This gender disparity in STEM hasn't gone unnoticed.  Feminists, politicians and the university system have expended great effort in trying to recruit more women in STEM fields.  The image in the title bar of the article I linked to is very telling.

Look at all these women in STEM!

Having a photo of female graduates in an article discussing high test scores and STEM majors is a subtle attempt at trying to raise a woman's self-esteem enough to start studying STEM.  I also, saw recent advertisements for colleges that look something like this.

Grrrllll  Power!

And there are woman's outreach efforts much more explicit than this.  There are workshops, clubs, guidance counselors, etc all trying to push women into STEM.  Everybody in the educational system is in on it.  But what usually ends up happening is this:

To many people, especially the feminists, gender equality means equality in outcome.  So unless there's a 50/50 gender balance in all fields, they will see it as a problem and lobby for more money to be spent and programs created to try and get more women into STEM and other male dominated spaces.  But if it's an issue of intelligence, than these lobbying efforts are going to flop.  There are simply more men than women scoring higher on the intelligence tests that would determine how well you would do in a STEM field, and hence, become an inventor.


Speaking as somebody who is in a STEM field, coming up with new and innovative ideas is extremely difficult, even for somebody with the intellectual chops to do well in these fields.  Most of the time we are just tinkering--it's high level tinkering, but still just tinkering.  Maybe one idea may lead to something that is life changing or truly innovative, but most of the time, attempts at innovation and invention will fail.

Looking at modern research and the historical record, there doesn't seem to be systematic oppression of women.  Logically, there's no reason why women can't be inventors and some of them do, but in much smaller numbers than men.  The capacity to invent seems to be rooted in biology that is ultimately reflected in intelligence scores in several different areas of intelligence (verbal, science and math).  Why this seems to be a trait more common in men isn't very well understood.  It would require more advancements in neuroscience and studies in cognition.