Men and Women in Mensa

by Mary W. Matthews

“In Mensa women are underrepresented,” Victor Serebriakoff wrote in 1985. “Everywhere, in every country, the proportion is the same. Only one member in three is a woman.”

I have always been mystified at why men are overrepresented in Mensa. There is nothing intrinsically superior in the Y chromosome; in fact, intelligence is carried on the X chromosome. And we all begin life as females; gender differentiation does not begin until a fetus is six to 14 weeks old, and if the process of masculinization is interrupted, for example by the mother’s poor nutrition, the fetus reverts to female. (This is the main reason we all have nipples.) While there are developmental differences between the genders, I have never in my life heard it suggested that twice as many boys as girls are A students, and indeed, an authority on gifted education tells me that in her experience, no such disparity exists.

Serebriakoff had no idea why men should be overrepresented in Mensa. He could only quote Intelligence and Personality, in which professor Alice Heim pointed out that men seem to be more extreme as a gender. There are more males than females on the far ends of all sorts of continua — there are more male morons, idiot savants, felons, deadbeats, and so forth. Women, Heim said, are more “mediocre.” So, interestingly, are creative people; highly creative men tend to have more feminine qualities than the average, and highly creative women tend to have more masculine qualities.

Setting aside my resentment of the semantically loaded “mediocre,” I find this explanation less than compelling. What about the cultural imbalances caused by the patriarchy? It is the height of injustice for women to be declared inferior competitors in a given arena because the patriarchy will not allow them a level playing field.

I recently read a fascinating book, Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet and the Goddess, which presents a well-known neurosurgeon’s very plausible theory about where the patriarchy came from. Much of the following is a condensation of or elaboration upon almost 500 pages of thorough and carefully researched argument.

Because we are highly intelligent, we humans are born at a stage that would be on the “young fetus” side in other animals. If we remained in the womb for the full two-plus years we would need for a proper gestation, our brains would be much too large for us to be born the natural way, and all mothers would die in childbirth.

As “external fetuses,” babies and toddlers must be taught many things that other animals are born knowing, for example how to walk. Their mothers are the natural teachers — who wants a wailing baby along on a hunting party? Well before we were even homo (and by the way, the Latin for “man” is vir; homo means "person"), males began specializing in hunting and killing and females began specializing in collecting and nurturing. As will become clear, at about the same time our gender tasks began to differentiate, so did our brain structure.

All vertebrates have bi-lobed brains. Virtually all vertebrates except human beings have mirror-image lobes: each half performs the same types of tasks. While a few species show a small amount of hemispheric lateralization, only humans do so pro­nouncedly — right- or left-handedness, for example, or clumping language in the left hemisphere. If each lobe of the human brain performed the same types of tasks as the other, our heads would probably be too large for our necks to hold up.

Most well-informed people know that the left lobe of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the right lobe the left side; most know that the speech and language center is on the left side, the artistic/creative center on the right. Many also know that the two lobes work closely together, with many useful failsafes built in. One significant difference is that women’s corpus callosums have 10 to 33 percent more neuronal fibers than men’s, allowing women better interaction between the two lobes, and thus a greater ability both to express and interpret emotion and to multi-task.

But it is only relatively recently that neuroscientists mapping split-brained and normal-brained people have identified the sharp differences between the two lobes. It is only a slight oversimplification to say that if a person is badly injured in the left hemisphere of the brain, the result is paralysis of the right side of the body, a catastrophic loss of speech, reading, and writing, and a catastrophic inability to engage in abstract thinking. If a person is badly injured in the right hemisphere of the brain, the result is paralysis of the left side of the body and a catastrophic inability to solve spatial problems, recognize faces, appreciate music, or engage in holistic or synthetic thinking.

The left lobe of the brain is linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract. The right lobe of the brain is holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete. The left lobe is better at “turning off” compassion, the better to successfully hunt and kill. The right lobe of the brain is better at “turning off” the desire to dominate, the better to teach screaming fetuses how to become children.

While all human beings who are not ill or impaired use both sides of their brains, the left lobe of the brain is predominantly associated with masculine traits; the right lobe of the brain is predominantly associated with feminine traits. It is no accident that women invented agriculture and medicine, and that men invented the spear, the bow and arrow, the gun, and the A-bomb.

Before the invention of the alphabet, most preliterate cultures were more egalitarian than not, and most worshipped the Goddess. She was known as Anat, Aphrodite, Astarte, Asherah, Demeter (literally, “mother of the gods”), Danu, Ishtar, Isis, Kali, Mari, Metra, Ningal, Shakti, and a zillion other names, but so far as can be known, in every preliterate culture, the Goddess created the Universe and kept it going. When she acquired a consort, he was invariably weaker than she. In climates where hunting was highly valued, the consort was relatively stronger; but in almost all cases, the consort died each winter so that the Goddess could resurrect him, and her people’s fertility, each spring. A few examples include Ishtar and Tammuz, Cybele and Attis, and Astarte and Baal.

Since the concept of an alphabet (any alphabet) was invented in Canaan in approximately 2200 BCE, let us focus on the Fertile Crescent, which gave the world its first and most important literature. The Hebrew Scriptures are the only literature that have been in continuous publication for almost 3,000 years, and, especially when combined with the Christian Testament into the Bible, they have had an indisputable impact on world culture.

In the beginning was the Goddess Asherah. Eventually she acquired a consort, El. After a few thousand years, an upstart god named Yahweh came along, and after a few hundred years, Yahweh muscled El out of the line-up and became Asherah’s new consort.

Roughly ONE hundred years after that, the first myths began to appear that Yahweh was the only god that ever was or ever will be; that Asherah was no true god and that it was evil for people (especially women) to cling to her worship; and that Yahweh was going to vanquish anyone who disagreed. (Nevertheless, worshippers still clung to Asherah for another 1,000 years, to the fury of the prophet Jeremiah.) The Hebrew Scriptures were written by priests of the cult of Yahweh. (Some of the Torah incorporates myths about El.)

What caused this revolutionary change? The Canaanites invented a system of using letters to indicate speech sounds, the first alphabet.

Before there was writing, there were pictures and then pictographs — images whose data relied more on the brain’s right hemisphere to process than on the left. The many petroglyphs that archeologists have found may be pictographs we cannot read.

The Sumerians invented cuneiform in approximately 2800 BCE, but it appears to have been used principally in business — how many jars of olive oil were offered to the goddess Inanna, for example. (Inanna’s consort was Dumuzi, who died each winter so that Inanna could resurrect him in the spring.) Cuneiform, at first heavily pictographic, eventually became abstract enough to suit the left lobe — but early Sumerian writers disdained linearity and put their wedge-shaped marks anywhere on the writing surface they chose, relying on the right lobe’s pattern recognition skills to get their message across.

Five centuries later, the Akkadians conquered Sumer; many educated people have heard of Sargon, the great conqueror. The Akkadians invented phonograms, which translated sounds into writing, jettisoning pictograms altogether and introducing such abstract words as justice, destiny, and truth. They also invented the notion of arranging writing linearly, after about a hundred years settling on left to right. Virtually no one has heard of Sargon’s daughter Enheduanna, the world’s earliest known poet. Enheduanna was the Great High Priest of the Fertile Crescent, and her poems honoring Inanna are still exquisite, more than 4,200 years after they were written.

The Egyptians invented hieroglyphs, which were both ideograms and phonograms. One had to have a sense of artistry to read, and especially to write, hieroglyphs. Egypt’s most important goddess was Isis, whose brother/husband was Osiris. The jealous god Seth murdered Osiris, hacked his corpse to pieces, and hid the parts. Isis found the remains, took them back to Egypt, and resurrected Osiris — in the spring, of course.

And then the Canaanites invented the alphabet — that is, the system of writing abstract phonogramic symbols in a linear fashion. Instead of literacy being reserved for a highly intelligent elite, almost anyone could learn to read, and even write. That is the great blessing of the alphabet. The great curse of the alphabet (again, any alphabet) is that instead of viewing concrete images — “Look, a drawing of a tree!” — people must read in a linear, sequential, black-and-white, highly abstract way. A way almost exclusively left-brained.

At the exact moment that people began overprivileging the left lobe of the brain, Yahweh suddenly demanded that worshippers refrain from creating “graven images,” which some cultures (e.g., the Amish, Muslims) even today interpret as a ban on all images. Syncretism — that is, merging the myths of two or more cultures, as when the Hebrews adopted Seth and turned him into one of Eve’s sons — became a major no-no, and still is. Most significantly, Yahweh demanded that all good male believers read the Scriptures. Meanwhile, a first-century rabbi remarked that “to teach a girl the Torah [i.e., how to read and think analytically] is to teach obscenity.”

Wherever an alphabet appeared, women were promptly forbidden to own property, forbidden to inherit, forbidden to take part in court cases, and forbidden to do almost anything fun. An ancient myth celebrating the gift of morality to humans by Asherah, symbolized by the Tree of Life and by the wise serpent, was shanghaied by the cult of Yahweh and turned into a myth condemning womankind as a gender for introducing sin, evil, and death into the world. It is no coincidence that the only character in the revamped myth who is specifically cursed by Yahweh is the honest serpent, symbol of Asherah.

I do not intend to go into a detailed exploration of history — The Alphabet and the Goddess encompasses 476 engrossing pages — but the pattern is clear. Athens embraced the alphabet and gave us great ancient literature that still inspires the world today. It also gave us the great but misogynistic Plato and Aristotle,

During the Dark Ages, literacy among the general population declined, and women’s status improved dramatically. With scholasticism, literacy rose; women were re-enslaved, and the Church busily massacred the Cathars, a back-to-basics movement of Christianity that believed in gender equality and nonviolence.

The prophet Muhammad was illiterate until Allah miraculously taught him alphabet literacy overnight. The goddesses Al-Lat (the feminine form of Allah), Al-Uzza, and Manat were promptly declared non-deities, and the verses of the Qur’an that speak respectfully of them are vehemently denied even today — in fact, Salman Rushdie remains under sentence of death solely for the crime of pointing out the existence of the respectful, ergo “satanic” verses. The Qur’an, written partly by Allah (who created humanity from a drop of his celestial sperm), partly by Muhammad, and largely by the deity Allah-and-his-prophet-Muhammad, addresses male believers as “you.” All other human beings, whether unbelievers or female believers, are referred to as “they.” The Qur’an dictates that on every scale except the ability to bear children, women are worth one third to one fourth of what men are worth.

The Church gave hardly a hoot about “witches” until after Guten­berg invented the printing press. With the meteoric rise of literacy that the blessing of printing gave us also came a dramatic plunge in the status of women (who naturally were denied higher education because of their gender). The Church began torturing and massacring already vulnerable women, who made up almost 90 percent of those murdered in its witch hunts (and in Germanic countries, almost 100 percent).

In the 19th century, Faraday, Daguerre, and Edison worked their magic, and women’s status began to rise as the brain’s right hemisphere was finally allowed a little more exercise. Susan B. Anthony and her “com-mères” could not have succeeded, as much as they did, before the invention of photography led to illustrated newspapers and magazines.

In the 20th century, the work of Edison, Philo T. Farnsworth, and the many inventers of the personal computer combined to result in more magic, and the women’s liberation movement took off like a skyrocket. The effect of the movies, television, computers, and the Internet on women’s lives cannot be overestimated. I have relatives, alive today, who were born before women achieved the right to vote. In World War II, women — for the first time in history invited into the work force — were asked not to smoke so that scarce tobacco could go to its “rightful” destination, fighting men. In Star Trek’s 1969 episode “Turnabout Intruder,” Captain James T. Kirk took it for granted that no female was capable of commanding a starship. In the 1970s, Charlie’s Angels regularly trounced the bad guys through the mighty power of “T and A.” In the 1980s, Diana Spencer became the first royal bride in British history who did not vow to “love, honor, and obey.”

When I was 17 and on my way to college, my mother said to me, “I used to hope that you’d be a nuclear physicist or something else important. Now I just want you to be married and happy.” My mother was well into her adulthood before she ever saw a television; it has never occurred to her, even at 78, that it is possible for a woman to achieve success in the world and be married and happy.

We are only beginning to see the effects of the explosion of creativity and egalitarianism that is computers and the Internet. On the World Wide Web, one does not merely read black marks on a white page sequentially, but wanders through bright gardens of words, colorful still and moving images, and often music. Both halves of the brain participate in thinking.

The left hemisphere of the brain is logical, linear-thinking, dualistic, analytical, anti-image, and hunter-killer. The right hemisphere of the brain is holistic, intuitive, image-loving, music- and art-loving, concrete, synthetic, and collector-nurturer. While just about all of us use both hemispheres of our brains, the left lobe is predominantly masculine and the right lobe is predominantly feminine.

Speech and language reside in the left lobe of the brain. In 90 percent of humans (but only 70 percent of Mensans), handedness favors the left lobe of the brain; the left hand is for shielding, protecting, and other “gross” activities, the right hand for throwing the spear, using the pen, and other “fine” activities. In reading and hand-writing, the left brain’s discriminatory, analytic mode is used to isolate tiny sections of the visual field and either analyze them to determine what letters they represent, and process them sequentially, or create them sequentially. In other words, the left, masculine lobe of the brain is overprivileged, while the right, feminine lobe of the brain languishes.

The left lobe of the brain is the natural home of standardized tests, which require logic, analysis, abstraction, and linear thinking. To become a member of Mensa, one must perform well on at least one of more than 200 standardized tests — not merely IQ tests, but such tests as the GREs, the LSATs, the GMATs, the GCTs, etc., etc.

At first the proportion of women in Mensa remained at approximately one-third. But with the rise of television, and particularly with the rise of computers and the Internet, this proportion has been rising. Today, in 2003, women constitute close to 40 percent of Mensa. This is an effective increase of approximately 20 percent — further evidence that there is nothing intrinsically superior about the Y chromosome.

What would Mensa look like today if admission to its ranks were based on tests that favored the right hemisphere of the brain — the intuitive, creative side, the side that favors holistic and synthetic thinking over logic and analysis? I think I know. I think it would be 60 to 67 percent female.

Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. London, New York: Penguin/Compass. 1998.