Girls Versus Boys: The Final Battle

SAT data provide an exciting reservoir of information thanks to extremely large sample sizes with detailed demographic data over a number of years. I previously graphed SAT scores by race and showed that the score gap between White people and African Americans greatly narrowed until the early 1990’s and that Asian Americans have been improving their SAT scores, unlike other groups. Now, I shall present how men and women compare for each racial group.


In 1966, William Petersen coined the phrase “model minority” to recognize the accomplishments of Japanese Americans. Liberals revised the label to “model minority myth,” which imparts elements of bitter sneering and jealousy, but the original compliment has never been truer for the SAT results of Asian Americans. Asian-American women appear to be advancing even faster than their male counterparts. Recent years have brought declines in the standard deviation gaps between Asian-American men and women on the math and critical reading (formerly “verbal”) sub-tests.

May all the trees that died for treatises on the eroticization of Asian women and the emasculation of Asian men rest in peace. With that said, I shall add my Asian Female Fit Hypothesis: Asian women are able to progress faster than other demographic categories because they transcend gender roles and expectations, in contrast with White women.

Though White women did slightly improve last year on the math SAT sub-test relative to White men, that was mostly due to a slight drop in the male score. Numerous factors could be discouraging academic progress for White women, particularly in math and the hard sciences. White women, as a group, might not place as high a priority on accomplishment in mathematics. Perhaps they see math as leading to career tracks that are less enjoyable or that would earn an income that would intimidate male suitors. Perhaps they associate math with demanding but financially rewarding careers, and some of them feel that only men should have to fill such a demanding provider role. Advanced math coursework and preparation could have a culture that is unappealing to White women. Also, a common view argues that women feel displaying intelligence makes them less attractive to men. For both young men and women, distractions can hurt academic performance, but perhaps White women are more preoccupied by them than White men.

I suggest that Asian-American women are able to transcend such barriers better than White women. Asians, in general, have a higher average IQ and tend to perform especially well on the SAT math sub-test. This advantage could give Asian women a confidence with mathematics above some threshold that makes further study more enjoyable and less intimidating. Another commonly held view is that Asian women are more amenable, perhaps owing to Confucian values, to relationships with studious men with whom they would come more in contact. I think that men actually do appreciate intelligent women, and the cultures of professions steeped in mathematics, like engineering, are so lacking in female representation that Asian women on such professional paths might be finding a comfortable niche. I also propose that Asian women have the advantage of simple beauty.

At first, one might think that physical attractiveness has nothing to do with mathematics skill, but beauty and fashion have a profound effect on the self-esteem of young women and can become a demanding preoccupation. Many Asian women have a simple beauty that does not really require makeup or hair treatments in modern American culture. Most Asian women whom I have known also seem to be naturally thin without exercising. A recent large meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies found three important loci for body fat percentage. According to the HapMap database, two of the alleles associated with increased body fat are far more common in White and Black people than in Chinese and Japanese people. The third allele is somewhat more common in Japanese and Chinese people, but the study found that this allele was associated with body fat percentage in Europeans, not in people from Northern India.

Allele Frequencies of loci that increase body fat percentage:

FTO:
White – 46.0%
Chinese – 13.9%
Japanese – 18.6%
African-American – 46.5%
Nigerian Yoruban – 45.2%
Mexican-American – 20.7%
Gujarati Indian – 25.2%

IRS1:
White – 41.8%
Chinese – 10.0%
Japanese – 6.8%
Nigerian Yoruban – 64.3%

SPRY2 (increased body fat percentage in Europeans, not Northern Indians):
White – 27.7%
Chinese – 48.1%
Japanese – 45.0%
African-American – 14.0%
Nigerian Yoruban – 18.4%
Mexican-American – 35.3%
Gujarati Indian – 48.5%

African-American women also are closing their gap with African-American men on the SAT math sub-test, but scores for Black people, as a whole, are declining, and the gap with White people seems to be slightly widening, as I previously discussed. Still, African-American women are the only demographic to consistently outperform their male counterparts on the SAT critical reading sub-test. On the newer writing sub-test, all demographics have a female advantage, but African Americans have the largest gender gap, and it is growing. Ever since the writing sub-test began in 2006, African-American women have had a consistent total raw score advantage over African-American men, and they are the only group of women to ever do so. Although it might be declining, the Hispanic male advantage over Hispanic women lies at the other end of the spectrum.


In conclusion, whether you are a dumb blonde, a dragon lady who is good at math, a troubled Black man, or a macho Mexican, the SAT reinforces the offensive stereotype that is right for you.







Kilpeläinen TO, Zillikens MC, Stančákova A, Finucane FM, Ried JS, Langenberg C, Zhang W, Beckmann JS, Luan J, Vandenput L, Styrkarsdottir U, Zhou Y, Smith AV, Zhao JH, Amin N, Vedantam S, Shin SY, Haritunians T, Fu M, Feitosa MF, Kumari M, Halldorsson BV, Tikkanen E, Mangino M, Hayward C, Song C, Arnold AM, Aulchenko YS, Oostra BA, Campbell H, Cupples LA, Davis KE, Döring A, Eiriksdottir G, Estrada K, Fernández-Real JM, Garcia M, Gieger C, Glazer NL, Guiducci C, Hofman A, Humphries SE, Isomaa B, Jacobs LC, Jula A, Karasik D, Karlsson MK, Khaw KT, Kim LJ, Kivimäki M, Klopp N, Kühnel B, Kuusisto J, Liu Y, Ljunggren O, Lorentzon M, Luben RN, McKnight B, Mellström D, Mitchell BD, Mooser V, Moreno JM, Männistö S, O'Connell JR, Pascoe L, Peltonen L, Peral B, Perola M, Psaty BM, Salomaa V, Savage DB, Semple RK, Skaric-Juric T, Sigurdsson G, Song KS, Spector TD, Syvänen AC, Talmud PJ, Thorleifsson G, Thorsteinsdottir U, Uitterlinden AG, van Duijn CM, Vidal-Puig A, Wild SH, Wright AF, Clegg DJ, Schadt E, Wilson JF, Rudan I, Ripatti S, Borecki IB, Shuldiner AR, Ingelsson E, Jansson JO, Kaplan RC, Gudnason V, Harris TB, Groop L, Kiel DP, Rivadeneira F, Walker M, Barroso I, Vollenweider P, Waeber G, Chambers JC, Kooner JS, Soranzo N, Hirschhorn JN, Stefansson K, Wichmann HE, Ohlsson C, O'Rahilly S, Wareham NJ, Speliotes EK, Fox CS, Laakso M, & Loos RJ (2011). Genetic variation near IRS1 associates with reduced adiposity and an impaired metabolic profile. Nature genetics, 43 (8), 753-60 PMID: 21706003

Intelligence

This page will serve as a permanent index of all of my writings on intelligence and psychometrics.

The Post-Racial Era is Over – January 8, 2010

Smart People are Educated, Greedy, Sexist Bigots – July 20, 2011

Meet Towelie, the IQ Test of the Future – August 27, 2011

The SAT’s Cohen’s d & the Topography of IQ Denialism – September 2, 2011

The SAT in Red, White, and Brown – September 18, 2011

Girls Versus Boys: The Final Battle – October 9, 2011

Racial Amplitudes of Scholastic Aptitude – April 11, 2012

The SAT Bell Curve – April 25, 2012

Just Say No Limit: Trayvon, Dextromethorphan, Marijuana, and MAOA – July 5, 2012

The Hispanic Asian Flynn Effect – August 5, 2012

Genes Dealt Made Asians Svelte – September 10, 2012

The SAT Zombie Apocalypse – September 29, 2012

Arthur Jensen & JP Rushton – November 1, 2012

Inscrutable Voters – December 6, 2012

Scientists Rediscover the Violence Gene, MAOA-2R – December 30, 2012

The SAT-ACT Score Map – June 10, 2013

Black Suits, Gowns, & Skin: SAT Scores by Income, Education, & Race – October 24, 2013

Parents’ Income Poorly Predicts SAT Score – July 4, 2014

Merit’s Liquidity – October 18, 2014

The SAT in Red, White, and Brown

The College Board just released another year’s set of SAT results, and Steve Sailer’s blog took notice of the results and the posts that I have recently made on the subject. I try to emphasize science over conjectured analysis on this blog so that my readers can feel some confidence in the knowledge they gain here. Interpreting the SAT is complicated by many factors, including the various tweaks and reforms that the College Board has instituted and the changes in the examinee populations. However, using standard deviations should help in making group comparisons because the students are experiencing the same changes. I have tried to address the differences in demographic groups’ increased participation. In general, every group is increasing their participation more than White people. Here is a graph of each group’s increased participation from the year prior:


When one sees the raw-score graphs below, the trend of Asian advancement is obvious, which exposed the anxieties of many White people in the discussions that I saw. Analysis of the data ultimately becomes a Rorschach test of disposition towards Asian cultures. Clearly, SAT scores are revealing strengths that will serve Asians well wherever meritocracy is allowed. A common reaction from some White people to this data is to try to introduce nuance and critical analysis to emphasize flaws in Eastern societies. I think it is reasonable to conclude that every culture has its flaws, which is a strong argument for cultural exchange. However, I believe that those who are trying to champion these arguments just want to explain away Asian accomplishments to convince Whites that they are superior or at least have enough good points to raise the stock value of racial separation. I have yet to see anyone address the fact that such illustrations could have universal appeal. How does one convince the world that a group of people, like White people, is a nice group without also convincing them that the group is also a nice group to be around? Apparently, White nationalists are trying to posture that every group is nice, but only when each is separate, and mixed groups do not count. I think I can make a stronger case that the success of Asians on the SAT proves that testing is not White-supremacist. In fact, as tuition rates grow, tests are less elitist than education and, therefore, more indicative of important characteristics other than privilege.


Here is the updated graph of the Asian-White score gaps in standard deviations.


Here is the updated graph for the Black-White score gaps.


I have not given much discussion on this blog to people who self-identify as having Hispanic ethnicity or those of Native-American ancestry. I think these can be confusing designations for my purposes because I am interested in genetic research, and such groups have significant ancestral overlap, just as many American White people can claim a fraction of Native-American heritage. I find that these minority groups do not receive as much attention in the scientific literature, probably partly for this reason. Native American SAT scores are based on a relatively small and fluctuating sample size, so I caution against drawing strong conclusions from this graph.


I compiled the three Hispanic groups that the SAT delineates into a single population. The Hispanic sample has grown significantly, so an increasing gap might not surprise. However, I would have expected more changes to the verbal/critical reading score gap, either improvement from acculturation and language mastery or a worsening gap from continued immigration of young non-native speakers. Instead, the math score gap has changed more and seems to have converged with the verbal score gap. I could hypothesize that changes made to the SAT caused it to become a more g-loaded exam like an IQ test because general intelligence is a component of both exam sub-tests. This is a hypothesis that could be tested by re-assembling an older version of the test.


However, the Educational Testing Service’s principal measurement statistician Neil Dorans claimed that the 1995 recentering of the test explains this. “[O]n the original [SAT mathematical] scale, scores below 400 were compressed and scores between 400 and 700 were stretched out…. Hispanic students are 40 points higher at the median on SAT M than on SAT V on the original scale, whereas they have the same median (945) for both SAT M and SAT V on the recentered scale. Thus, the major effect of recentering for Hispanic students was to bring SAT V scores in line with SAT M scores and place both sets of scores closer to the midpoint of the score reporting scale.” He also credited recentering with bringing Asian-American SAT verbal scores “more in line with” SAT math scores. However, recentering was supposed to make each group “appear closer to average on SAT M than they appeared on the original scale,” making Asians, Whites, and men “appear less above average” and do the reverse for Black people, Hispanics, and women, without changing the “rank orderings of individuals.” I wonder if this is why the College Board does not make reports from before the recentering available to the general public. If one ignores the raw score graphs and examines the standard deviation numbers compared to White examinees that are published for Black examinees back to 1986 and for Hispanics back to 1992, one can see that the gaps between Whites and these minorities grew. Perhaps an increased sense of competitive urgency motivated White examinees more after 1995.

Any questions one might still have can be answered with a shrug. Dorans insisted we heed a heedless take on the SAT. “To believe that one set of scales represents ‘truth’ is to reify the score scales in a way that scores on general intelligence tests were reified during the first half of the twentieth century.” Then, he provided a reference to The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Black Women with Herpes, and More!

I think it is safe to say that herpes is the funniest venereal disease. A sexually-transmitted infection that is mortifying but not mortiferous seems tailor-made for the age of Failblog. On the other hand, many are unaware that herpes rarely can be fatal. A mother can transmit herpes to her infant at birth. The consequences of this neonatal herpes infection can include meningitis, pneumonia, and death. A herpes infection can also facilitate HIV transmission. Medication can manage genital herpes, but no cure exists because the virus hides in the nervous system.

Such an indelible marker risks spreading forbidden knowledge about human behavior and population differences. One mantra of the collection of clichéd falsehoods collectively named “political correctness” is that sexually transmitted diseases do not discriminate. However, if The Man injected most black women with a drug that caused itchy genital sores, would it not be fair to accuse The Man of discrimination? Well, the US Centers for Disease Control reported last year that the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) results showed that herpes is so racist that almost half of black women and girls aged 14 to 49 have it. To be exact, 48% (with a 95% confidence interval from 44.1% to 52.0%) of these women are seropositive for herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV 2) genital herpes. In contrast, only 15.9% of non-Hispanic white women have it.


Hate Graph. (Turn Away!)
Now, as funny and relatively benign as this incredibly common condition usually is, I would not want to engage in a discussion that seems to mock anyone’s actual serious suffering. I feel compassion for those with this disease and truly hope for a cure and a vaccine. Nevertheless, the reaction to the NHANES results is instructive about the meaning of the word stereotype and left-wing resistance to science.

Take the reaction of The Root, which was started by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the black Harvard professor who infamously accused a police officer of racial profiling because the officer wanted to ask him some questions after Gates broke into his own residence. Writing for The Root, Sheree Crute quoted Dr. David Malebranche of Emory “whose research focuses on STDs in African Americans” as saying, “This means that they have been exposed to the herpes virus, but it does not mean that these women have actually developed the disease or have active herpes. In fact, they may never develop active herpes.” What brilliant medical advice! Yes, ma’am, you have been exposed to herpes, but you do not have the disease. The virus is inside your body. You can infect others. Fortunately, you only have the disease at the various times that painful blisters appear on your privy parts. Feel free to live life as if nothing happened. Actually, Dr. Malebranche, two previous small studies determined that 56% of genital herpes transmissions, in one, or 69% in the other, occur without active symptoms. A person who contracts the herpes virus without yet having symptoms sheds the virus and has a 20% chance of being contagious at any given time. More than 4 out of 5 cases of genital herpes caused by herpes simplex virus 2 are undiagnosed possibly due to a lack of symptoms, according to the CDC study.



Dr. David J. Malebranche
Black Herpes Expert

Dr. Malebranche’s dubious logic feeds a black community that is hungry for denial. Danielle Canada, writing for “HipHopWired,” repeated his quotation and added that “people were shocked and outraged” by what the CDC report “seemed to say.” This forced the CDC to write to “HipHopWired” directly, saying, “We at CDC want to make it clear that CDC has not changed its position…” and “We also want to make it clear that Dr. David Malebranche … is not a CDC physician or representative…” Another delusion was offered by a British black woman named Susan Onyejiuwa, who noted that “the report actually says that 16 percent of the total American population have herpes, and of these 16 percent, 48 percent of people fall under the African-American female category.” The “false report” that 48% of black women have herpes worries Onyejiuwa because it conveys a sense that “it would be best to keep away” from black women, she says. If she were correct that 48% of the 16% of Americans with herpes are black women, then the percentage of the black women in the study who have HSV2 genital herpes would be much higher—63%. Based on her delusion, Onyejiuwa started an online petition against the CDC study. Think of all the lives that we could have saved if we had only thought to petition against epidemiologists when the AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s.

These people are all partly right in that it is not true that 48% of black women have herpes. This is because the CDC study only examined the prevalence of genital herpes caused by herpes simplex virus 2. Genital herpes is also caused by herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1), the cold-sore virus. Thus, the true percentage of black women with genital herpes, an incurable sexually transmitted infection, is considerably more than half. Doctors tend to associate HSV1 only with cold sores of the mouth, but as oral sex has become more common, so has genital herpes caused by HSV1. Between 1992 and 2006, the percentage of new incidences of genital herpes in straight women attributable to HSV1 rose from 31% to 45%. There is sparse and contradictory evidence regarding the proportions of HSV1 and HSV2 in black people. A study from Seattle found that white people with herpes were almost four times more likely than “nonwhite” people to have herpes caused by HSV1, and black people in a 1998 study were less likely than white people to report having had oral sex. However, nonwhite people in Seattle are more likely to be Asian than black, and data on herpes infection rates among Asian Americans are nowhere to be found. Also, a 1992 study of unmarried adults in high-risk San Francisco neighborhoods found that both HSV1 and HSV2 were more common in black people than white people, especially HSV1 with 76% of black women being HSV1 positive compared to 43% of white women.


Black denialism of unflattering science is, of course, not limited to the herpes epidemic. Among African Americans, conspiracy theories about HIV and AIDS have become mainstream with deadly consequences. In spite of the recent shocking revelations about US involvement in the deliberate infection of 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and gonorrhea and the failure of the Tuskegee syphilis study to offer African Americans penicillin when it was identified as the standard of care, black denialism of science is ignorant and belaboring such scandals probably kills far more than those actual transgressions by encouraging conspiracy beliefs about HIV prophylaxis and treatment. A 2005 survey determined that 48% of black people think HIV is a man-made virus, 53% think a cure exists that is being kept from the poor, 16% think the US government created AIDS to control black people, 7% consider HIV treatments to be poison, and 4% of black men believe that doctors intentionally infect condoms with HIV. Having AIDS-related conspiracy beliefs makes black men significantly less likely to consistently use condoms.

Ironically, when black activists or liberals decide to reject science that makes them feel uncomfortable, they often accuse it of being “pseudoscience,” regardless of the poverty of scientific evidence in support of their own dogma. One is reminded of the quarrel that arose when then-Harvard president, Larry Summers, tried to explain some possible reasons why Harvard math and science professors are less likely to be women. One reason, he offered, was that men have a higher standard deviation that results in more men among the very high and very low ability levels. National Organization for Women President Kim Grady characterized this notion as suggesting that “women are inferior.” MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins expressed a similar misunderstanding that he meant that women have a genetic predisposition against math and engineering. I cannot quite remember whether I first learned about standard deviation in high school or middle school, but for these women to reveal their math ignorance in their attempts to defend the mathematics skills of women betrays just the sort of thoughtlessness and lack of self-awareness that seems particular to political correctness.