Men are more intelligent than women, but this isn't why

Hard to let a report finding that men score higher on IQ tests than women go by without comment. First of all, IQ tests are dumb. They don't tell you anything. It's like trying to assign a single numerical score to art. What would it mean to give Magritte a 92 and George Carlin a 94? There are so many dimensions to each artist that to condense them to a single number is next to meaningless. You can talk about more specific traits and compare them on those narrower qualities, but something like "intelligence" is so multi-faceted that it's profoundly retarded to even consider evaluating it using a single dimension. In fact, you should lose 20 points on your IQ test just for doing so.

Secondly, the dimensions IQ tests test you on are highly analytical aspects of cognition that it's not surprising men are slightly better at on average. It's well established that men inherently have a better sense of spatial reasoning than women, for instance. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Male humans had to go hunt and gather, so they needed to be able to navigate. Why would it be at all surprising that a metric that tests these kinds of abilities (which the IQ test does...I've taken one [long ago]) gives men a (very) slight advantage?

Now, lest anyone jump all over me, note this is very different from saying the reason for a gender gap in academics is a biological disadvantage (thank you Douchebag Summers). Among other things, I've said nothing about the distribution of analytical abilities in the set of people with the best minds. Just because the average is slightly lower doesn't mean that the upper tier of women couldn't deliver a hardcore academic ass-whooping to the upper tier of men. And it may well be the best woman would beat the best man.

More importantly, however, is the fact that on that particular issue, other factors inevitably dominate to a degree that any tiny biological differences would vanish in the noise. There's such a social aspect to becoming a tenured professor that any minute statistical disadvantage with regard to analytical ability by gender (if in fact it exists) would be vastly overshadowed by gender discrimination, male-centric power dynamics, cliqing, etc.

All that said, women are of course still dumb. Or, perhaps more accurately, crazy. It just happens to be the case that the above article doesn't address why.