If you are a follower of the gender essentialists on YouTube, you probably have come across quite a few videos by men and women who rattle off the stat that a woman’s chances of marrying decrease by 40% with every increase of every 16 IQ points over 100. Men, on the other hand, are 35% more likely to marry if their IQ increases 16 points over 100. This stat is said with grave solemnity, as if the smart women who have been doomed to be born intelligent are also responsible for their spinsterhood.
But is this statistic true?
Jordan Peterson has made many videos mentioning this statistic, as well as his daughter Mikhaila Peterson. One has over 3 million views on YouTube.
And it gets repeated here by Chris Williamson and Vincent Harinam:
These arguments slowly segway into women needing to prioritize marriage and accepting that they may need to date down. One of the ways to encourage women to date down is to make sex outside of marriage or monogy not socially acceptable. A return to the good old days.
This statistic is not followed with advice on how to reverse this dire fate in most cases though many a smart lady has surely heard the advice to play dumb. The result is a depressing reality for an intelligent woman. Not only will she likely earn less than a man, but she will also only have her cat to keep her company as she dies alone in her flat.
However, this statistic comes from a study almost a century old and was actually the source of debate, and fact checking in a long article published by ABC News in 2011. Also, many women who were ambitious in this time period and wanted a career found it impossible to marry or start a family. Many companies did not employ married women.
Combined with the small sample size and the data being collected almost a century ago, this stat does not pass the fact checking muster. Not to mention that the study took place in the UK when the pundits using the stat are mainly directed towards an American audience.
Not only that, but since the publication of this study marriage has shifted from a stepping stone to a capstone experience, one that celebrates life achievements instead of setting up a couple to obtain them together. The result is that the group of people most likely to be married (not to have kids or live together, but to be legally married in the US) are educated men and women. The more education the better. It can be safe to assume that those who pursue higher education are correlated with higher intelligence.
What makes the use of this statistic even more surprising is that over a decade ago a flurry of articles were published pointing out the fallacy in the logic of this study.
CAMBRIDGE, CAMBRIDGESHIRE - NOVEMBER 02: Portrait of Jordan Peterson at The Cambridge Union on ... [+]
This begs the question, what is the purpose of using an old study that is no longer valid by Jordan Peterson, Mikhaila Peterson and others?
Women face more options than ever before, but instead of this giving them freedom to live the life they want in many instances it only brings condemnation for their life choice. As any childless woman will tell you, strangers love to condemn her choice. Instead of working to make motherhood more attractive with simple proposals such as family leave, access to affordable quality daycare or the simple acknowledgement that motherhood isn’t for everyone, some pundits want to show women that their rejection of motherhood will bring them only unhappiness.
But it goes further. After being warned of the dangers of population explosion in the 1980s now we are being warned of the dangers of population decline. The culprit are women putting jobs over babies. Who can breed the next generation of workers (and consumers) if not these highly educated smart women?
Mikhaila Peterson, Founder, The Lion Diet, Inc., on HealthConf Stage during the final day of Web ... [+]
The career woman, who gave up motherhood and marriage for corporate compensation, is the perfect target. But this cold-hearted c-suite dweller might be as fictional as the Welfare Queen who haunted popular imagination in the 1980s. Financial success increases marriage rates, not lowers them. And if a woman really does not want to have children, what is to be gained by her having them?
So, if the reader of this article is worried about her prospects of finding a mate due to her intelligence she should rest easy knowing that while there may be many obstacles on her path, her IQ isn’t one of them.
