My First Impression While Taking This Project Was That It Would Be a Easy Project As People

Understanding creativity, innovation, knowledge network and entrepreneurship

2007

PRoject Report

“Are women more creative than men?”

Rohit Kumar Mehar

Date: 03 MARCH, 2007

Report Submitted To: Prof. Anil K. Gupta

Research: Method and Controversies

My first impression while taking this project was that it would be a easy project as people have their opinion about this issue and it would be quite simple to find a pattern in the way people think about it. But, when I started talking to men and women and their opinion about creativity, I got almost unanimous responses where each sex people believed they are superior than the other sex (all the women replied that they are more creative, 95% of men think they are more creative). Every person had his or her opinion or own definition of creativity and it spanned from intelligence to art to god gifts or something which cannot be defined. This made me go back to my hypothesis and work out a way where I can ask people to objectively grade men and women over creativity and provide logic for it. I tried to define creativity and closest I could find is

“Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.”

It has widespread interpretations and creativity in behavioral science varies from creativity in social psychology or cognitive sciences. It is attributed to divine intervention, cognitive processes, social environment, chances and personal traits. It made it even more difficult to quantify creativity to do a comparative test.

I searched psychology papers and came across this very interesting research paper, which tries to differentiate between creative and psychotic people. It defined creativity as a function of intelligence of a person and latent inhibition. Latent inhibition can be defined as non ability to focus or pay attention to things other than the main thing. The paper through empirical study proves that creativity of a person can be characterized by high IQ and very low level of latent inhibition. As low latent inhibition would allow person to focus on other things and high IW level would allow the person to process this information in a productive and creative manner. I found this definition quite intriguing and decided to use this as my test hypothesis as there are specific measures defined for quantifying intelligence through IQ levels. There is high controversy regarding there usability but they are used nonetheless. I decide to take latent inhibition as constant as it is something which cannot be measured and can be considered to be same for both the sexes. Hence, this research paper helped me scale down my research objective to a quantifiable question:

“Are women more intelligent than men??”

I asked the same set of person whom I surveyed previously this question and there was quite a significant change in the responses. 98% of men think that they are more intelligent than men, which is 3% more than the creativity survey and only 70% women think they are more intelligent than men, which is quite staggering as all of them initially said that they are more creative than men.

This topic has a history of controversies, most famously known is Larry Summers, who was the president of HarvardBusinessSchool and had to resign due to his sexist concerns shown about the small number of female scientists.

He gave three hypotheses, which believe contained all the reasons for such low representations:

High Powered Job Hypotheses–Summers thought that only men are able to do jobs which require high determination, time and efforts as women have other jobs to perform and cannot devote significant amount of time and require flexible timings.
Variability Hypotheses – In this hypothesis, Summers said that men are more intelligent than women on average and that might be a very prominent reason for there not performing well in science.
Discrimination Hypotheses –In this hypothesis, Summers said that there might be discrimination against women as men are in chargeof recruitment and they would like to hire only men.

These statements generated huge furor against Larry Summers and people found it very difficult to comprehend that the major reason for low representation is low intelligence and not discrimination as it is always considered. I searched on internet to figure out whether similar research ahs been conducted earlier, if there is what were the results and the logic involved.

Result: Fact and Counter facts

I found this very interesting research done by Dr. Paul Irwing. He tried to test the test the hypotheses that men are more intelligent than women. For this he used SAT score of over 80000 university students, which is a well known test for judging IQ level and tried to see any patterns. Research results were very staggering in terms of difference between IQ scores of mean and women. There was overall 5 IQ points difference in favor of men. Average SAT score is around 100, but above score of 120, there were twice as many men than women and if we take score higher than 170, there were thrice as many men as women. Another interesting fact was there was no difference between men and women below age and women. This might be accounted to the fact that at this time, they choose career preferences, which can have a direct bearing on the SAT scores. Also not only there were more men in higher IQ point brackets, but also there was a much skewed distribution in favor of men towards highly intelligent people. There were many major researches conducted on the similar thing which gave more or less similar results.

But, deriving our conclusion based only my very limited sample, which lacked logic in most of the cases or these studies, would not be right. There are various counter facts, which could cause suspicion about the same. Some of them are –

Ever Diminishing Variability–Although there is a huge difference in SAT scores of men and women but this difference has been decreasing in previous years. In past 15 years, ratio of boys to girls having score of 170+ has decreased from 12:1 to 3:1. Genetic structure of girls is not expected to change in a short time span of 15 years, hence one major reason for this change could be social equality provided to girls only in later years, which has allowed them to grow and show there potential in tests like SAT.
There is a very high dependence of SAT scores on the career choices made by the candidates. As men candidates are much likely to choose a career in mathematics and science, which constitute a major portion of test make them more likely to score well, whereas women who prefer arts and commerce as there career choice find it very difficult to compete.
There have been studies conducted, which do not deny superior intelligence of men in previous years but rather than attributing it to high IQ of men, they show that major reason for this difference is the social and cultural discrimination against women, which has not allowed them to grow.

After running through all this facts, I still could not settle this issue. The major reason from this study is that because men have higher IQ as proved by SAT scores, they are more creative. But creativity is not only about IQ, it also has latent inhibition, which is as important as IQ. SAT does account for social factors but its high emphasis on math and logical reasoning make it highly unfair towards women. But, at present there are no other mechanism to compare men and women.

Other important fact is there is a huge history of great creative women. But, it cannot be used to deny the results of research as there are examples on for men too and creative women example form a very small proportion of total. Also, latent inhibition is not constant; we just cannot measure it at present.

Conclusion

It is very difficult to conclude a research of these sorts as there are plenty of counter arguments available for both the opinions. But, I believe rather than discussing about superior creativity of one sex over the other sex, its important to nurture and harness the creativity in an individual irrespective of his/her sex. There can be many ways, which can nourish creativity such as, building motivation especially internal motivation, as determination can help one go mile, encouraging people to share ideas and take risks, promoting supportable beliefs about creativity and providing equal opportunity to all who are creative. This can really help us in bringing many creative ideas to the actual implementation stage and provide many productive solutions.