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The most practical benefit of realizing sex differences is how much women underestimate their intelligence, despite there being no gendered difference. Should women get cockier, or should men get less cocky?

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Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman

@sbkaufman

Dec 12, 2019

"New approaches are shedding light on the magnitude of sex differences in personality and the results are so strong and pervasive that they can no longer be ignored." My latest article for @sciam (been working on this one awhile trying to get it right): blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-mind

8:32 PM · Dec 12, 2019

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Are you saying that someday there will be a female Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Newton, Max Weber, Wittgenstein, and Dostoyevsky?

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Women should absolutely get cockier if only because we see the people that overestimate their abilities actually tend to overachieve.

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Maybe we should accept that men are cockier (an adjective literally derived from a male animal) than women and move on with it? It must be easier to correct for the perception bias caused by the cock-gap than to close the actual gap.

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This looks like carelessly taking down a Chesterton fence.

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yes

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Is it important that cockiness matches general intelligence?

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Since the tendency to be cocky is presumably also a biological sex difference you might as well be asking "Should women get taller, or should men get smaller?"

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Men have higher variance, so you can't really say "there's no difference"--it depends on the level of difficulty of the IQ test questions (or on how it is scored). I believe most IQ test scoring is done to ensure that the IQs are equal