Falk’s Reviews > Sex and Cognition > Status Update

“..items on tests like the SAT (and many other standardized tests) change over the years, because some items go out of fashion, or even because items performed better by one sex were deleted! We need to know that changes like these are not the basis of declines in group differences.” (p. 69)

"In chapter 5 on spatial abilities, we talked about men's superiority in appreciation of the true vertical and horizontal. This was measured by the Rod-and-Frame test, in which a line had to be positioned in the vertical (or horizontal) within a tilted frame, and by the Water-Level task, where subjects must draw the water line in jars tilted at various angles (...) Both tests require that the subject ignore a surrounding framework in making decisions. Women appear to be especially sensitive to such frameworks, a state called "field dependence" by some researchers (Witkin, 1967), meaning that they seem less able than men to make their judgments independent of the of the surrounding irrelevant input.
Generalizing from these studies, Dewar (1967) predicted that women might show greater susceptibility to a perceptual illusion, called the Müller-Lyer illusion (...) Most people see the line with the arrow arms going outward as longer than the line with the arms pointing inward, although the lines are actually the same length. The study participants were asked to repeatedly set the length of a series of such lines so that they appeared equal, by means of an apparatus on which they could adjust the length of one of the figures. Typically, as the subject performs this test over several trials, the illusion weakens. Arguing that this illusion might be similar to the influence of the tilted frame in the Rod-and-Frame test, Dewar predicted and found that in women the illusion did not decline over repeated trials as rapidly as it did in men." (p. 83)

"The verbal half of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) includes measures labeled: Information (general knowledge of the world), Comprehension (verbalizing responses to social conundrums), Arithmetic, Digit Span (how many digits can be repeated back correctly), Similarities (saying how two named things are alike), and Vocabulary (defining words). All of these subtests except Digit Span require some level of semantic and abstract ability, and none rely merely on articulatory skill. On this Verbal Scale, which gives a combined score for all the tests mentioned, men have shown a small advantage in almost every standardized sample since the inception of the WAIS. In originally devising his IQ test, Wechsler omitted tests that yielded large sex differences (such as mental rotation tests), the intent being to equate IQ scores obtained between men and women. So it is despite this aim that there is a slight edge for men on the Verbal IQ, indicating that, popular beliefs and claims to the contrary, women are not more verbally intelligent than men (Halpern, 1992; Hyde and Linn, 1988; Jensen, and Reynolds, 1983)." (pp. 94-5)

"On another quite different ability related to the use of words, however, women are consistently better. This is in the recall of words or of material that can readily be mediated verbally. The advantage appears at all ages so far tested, from young (Duggan, 1950; McGuinness, Olson, and Chapman, 1990) to old (Bleecker, Bolla-Wilson, and Meyers, 1988; Bromley, 1958), and regardless of whether the material is simple recall of a list of unrelated words or digits, or memory for the content of a paragraph. This may help to explain why a man and a woman who have shared a particular experience sometimes differ in what they recall, particularly about what was said. On average, we would expect women to have more accurate recall." (p. 95)