We’re constantly told that sexism and stereotypes are what hold women back in maths, engineering and tech. But it’s a lie. The real reason there aren’t more female astrophysicists is that the number of really, really smart girls is minuscule.

Sorry, no offence, but it’s true. Of course there’s the odd mould-breaking chick brainiac who gets a lot of press attention. But they’re in the minority, and not because girls are put off by some mythical male-dominated patriarchy.

There’s little doubt that men occupy more of the higher end of the IQ scale. Every study comes out the same. IQ isn’t a perfect measure of everything, but it’s the best indicator available of whether someone will be able to compete at the very highest levels.

So much in education has been changed recently to better suit women, including a renewed focus on coursework, because women don’t perform well in exams. That’s one reason why more women are going to university and more are graduating. But no amount of gerrymandering with educational styles is going to close the gap at the top of the IQ scale: all it does is unfairly disadvantage men further down.
We know gender equality efforts in STEM are foolish, because in a free society women choose the subjects they are most interested in. The high IQ outliers among women will continue to enter STEM, as they always have. Forcing those who are not elite to compete with those who are is not empowering. It’s just cruel. And lowering the bar to accommodate mediocre talent is just as bad. How far do feminists want us to fall behind Asia, exactly?

The point here is not to denigrate women, but rather to remind feminists who insist on quotas, affirmative action and various other batty methods designed to artificially level the playing field that they’re doing so not to redress any injustices perpetrated by a sexist system, but merely to meet arbitrary ideological objectives that run counter to biology which, yes, has a massive effect on how smart men and women are related to one another.

It doesn’t matter if women “test poorly” or if IQ doesn’t measure a totality of intelligence or if the test is somehow biased toward men. Because it’s IQ skills that are required to solve the hardest puzzles in mathematics and physics, not verbal communication or any of the other, equally important kinds of intelligence. The work that drives society and technology forward looks a lot like an IQ test, and men simply do better at them.

One last thing. Genius IQs also map neatly onto some kinds of artists, too. There’s a reason there are no truly great female artists and that women’s paintings don’t command the same prices as men’s. (And no, it’s not entrenched sexism in the art market.) Don’t expect a female Mozart or da Vinci any time soon – although art forms that focus on communication and empathy, such as novel-writing, do enjoy strong female representation. So there’s that, at least.