Look at Nobel laureates (especially in the scientific domains), inventors, creative geniuses, brilliant scholars, or any other category of people that are considered to be extremely smart. Almost all of them are male. There are some females in all of these categrories, of course, but the male/female distribution is nowhere near the 50/50 one might expect when starting from the assumption that men and women have on average equal intellectual capacities.

In the days of extreme feminism one could not even point out that men and women are different in obvious ways such as average physical strength, without being called a male chauvinist pig (whereby the word average is of course key: being not exactly the most muscular representative of the male species, I would never stand a chance in an arm-westling match against a female world champion javelin throw or put shot, or any even moderately trained female for that matter). Those days are now behind us, so isn’t it about time that we start facing the reality about men also being intellectually stronger than women?

If you think that the previous statement makes perfect sense, you’re making the logical fallacy of not considering the entire spectrum: if you only look at these specific groups of people, men are indeed the vast majority. But the same is equally true for a lot of other groups, where supreme intellectual capacity is usually not the most pronounced feature of the persons belonging to them: serial killers, hooligans, village idiots, rapists, etc.

Taking the entire spectrum into consideration, the logical conclusion it leads to is quite simple: both men and women are on average equally smart, but in men you find much bigger deviations from the average – in either direction.