Sex and scIQ: I showed in an earlier post that the male-female scIQ (basic knowledge of science) gap is around one-third of a standard deviation. Folks of all political stripes would agree that sexism in American society has diminished over the past few decades. If the sciIQ gender gap is due to a pattern of men holding women back that has weakened over time, we should see a larger difference among older Americans and a smaller one among younger people.

Here are the means for the "young" and "old" groups (I equalized the number in each group as much as possible since the sample isn't very big):


Mean scIQ score

Ages 43 and up
Men 98.8
Women 94.5
Gap 4.3
N = 213

Ages 18-42
Men 99.5
Women 95.0
Gap 4.5
N = 221

The gender gap is essentially the same for older and younger Americans. Although it might make some female professors pass out upon hearing the news, the data are consistent with the thesis that the sexes differ in their interest and aptitude for science.

Another look at scIQ: In the last post on correlates of scIQ, readers wondered if people who are just as knowledgeable about science as anyone else but who holds fundamentalist religious beliefs were receiving an artificially low scIQ score. I eliminated the three questions that touched on the question of creation or the age of the earth (i.e., the Big Bang, continental drift, and human evolution) and re-calculated scores with the remaining eight questions. Here are the results:


Mean scIQ

Race
Whites 100.0
Blacks 82.0
Hispanics 92.9

Religion--all races
Protestants 98.1
Catholics 96.2
Jews 103.7
None 98.0

Religion--whites only
Protestants 101.3
Catholics 97.8
Jews 104.4
None 100.3

Church attendance--all races
Never 95.9
More than weekly 96.8

Church attendance--whites only
Never 98.0
More than weekly 101.9

It does raise the scores of blacks and Hispanics a little when the 3 questions are removed, but it really makes a difference in the area of religion. The Protestant mean goes up a few points when non-whites are omitted, and it goes up again when the 3 questions are removed. And, compared to the very religious, the folks who never go to church no longer have higher scIQs. In fact, the churchgoers' means are higher for whites and all races together.

I mentioned in the last post that there is practically no correlation between IQ and church attendance, and after removing the 3 questions from the scIQ quiz, there is now no correlation between it and going to church--it is .01.

So it's not that people who are informed about science at a basic level are staying away from church; they just reject what science says if it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

Let's look at America's scIQ: In 2006 the General Social Survey asked 437 respondents eleven basic science questions. The first one, for example, was whether the earth's center is hot. I gave each person one point for answering a question correctly, and then summed the scores. My next step was to convert these totals so they resemble IQ scores. I set the white mean at 100, and the standard deviation at 15. Here are some averages:


ScIQ mean scores

Whites 100.0
Blacks 80.3
Hispanics 90.0

Males 99.2
Females 94.9

Less than high school 82.4
High school 94.2
Junior College 96.8
Bachelor 101.2
Graduate 103.1

Protestant 94.1
Catholic 98.7
Jewish 109.3
None 102.8

Never attends church 101.1
Attends more than once a week 87.4

New England 101.4
Middle Atlantic 98.0
East North Central 96.8
West North Central 103.6
South Atlantic 92.8
East South Central 95.7
West South Central 94.3
Mountain 101.8
Pacific 100.9


Interesting stuff. Blacks are well over one standard deviation below whites. This doesn't quite square with all the black doctors and scientists we see on TV. Women are about one-third of a SD below men--score one for Larry Summers.

Educational degree is no surprise; neither is the high Jewish mean. Anyone who completes high school should have been exposed to the information needed to answer the questions correctly. Many of those who finished high school and even attended college missed some of the questions, indicating that people are not understanding or retaining the information.

ScIQ differentiates churchgoers from non-attenders better than IQ does. I calculated Pearson correlations between scIQ and church attendance, and then the latter with IQ: the estimates are -.26 and -.08, respectively. Scientifically-minded people are less likely to go to church than people who are smart in a more general way, which supports the notion that there is intellectual friction between science and religion. By the way, scIQ correlates with IQ at .46.

It is also interesting that the West North Central region (Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota) is at the top of the scIQ list, considering that New England tops the IQ list based on GSS data. Is it all the nerdy white folks who live in those parts? The uncool Mountain States are not far behind.