A Date With A Brainiac

A really smart woman discusses the pleasures and pitfalls of high IQ dating.

Many people equate high IQ with “high achieving”, but they are two distinct things. Women with an above-average intelligence (IQ range of 110-130) are likely to be professionals: lawyers, nurses, dentists, mid-level civil servants, journalists, managers, teachers, pharmacists, librarians, or the like. High IQ women (those with an IQ>130) will tend toward more creative or “typically masculine” pursuits: surgery, engineering, research science, politics, philosophy, authorship, mathematics, music, art, architecture, high-level civil service, military office, or entrepreneurship. A woman would normally have to have unusually high visual-spatial scores in order to reach 130, which is why men outnumber women in that range and in those occupations.

Which is why intelligent women are so much in demand. They are rare birds compared to the number of high IQ men.

I have checked out the comments too and the vast majority are excellent. Also the blog hostess Alte chimes in frequently in the comments.

Posted by Alte on May 27, 2011 at 8:41 am

As to Chris’ comment, I thought it was relevant because of his assumption that having an “advanced degree” means that the women are high-IQ, but the majority of advanced degree holders are not high IQ. This is proven with simple statistics — there are way more advanced degree holders (6% of the adult population) than people of high IQ (2% of the adult population).

Add in the fact that most (58%) of those advanced degree holders are women but women are in the minority among those with high IQ, and that many people of high IQ don’t have advanced degrees, and it is just more proof of the fact that there is little direct correlation between advanced degrees and IQ>130. In other words, although someone of high IQ is more likely to have an advanced degree than someone chosen randomly from the general population, most people with advanced degrees are not high IQ — even those with prestigious degrees (technical schools like MIT or CalTech being the exception, as they select candidates with high v-s abilities).

You have to remember that high IQ is associated with DOE (over-excitability), which makes standardized education (i.e. college) very difficult for many of them. The women are also more likely to have highly fluctuating hormone levels, heavy and painful periods, and children with behavioral problems. All of those things mean that high IQ women who marry often fall out of the high-achievement pool rather quickly, which is one reason why homemaking is so prevalent at the very top of the income scales.

I had that problem with college sort of. I found women. Woo hoo! And I found them more exciting than the school work. Not to worry. I worked my way up to aerospace engineer completely bypassing the whole college thing.

Cross Posted at Classical Values