According to a British study, the higher the IQ that a woman has, the less likely that she will be married. This makes intuitive sense to us but looking at some of the comments around the net on this subject you get the feeling that fear of being labeled a sexist leads to some bizarre theories to explain the study’s results. First the study:

Marginal Revolution: Women, IQ and Marriage

In one study, four British universities measured the IQ of 900 11-year-olds and revisited them 40 years later to see how their lives had moved on.

They found that the brighter girls were less likely to find a man who wants to marry them, with their chances diminishing dramatically in direct proportion to their level of intelligence.

For each 16-point rise in their IQ, their marriage prospects fell by 40 per cent.

In contrast, boys’ chances increased by 35 per cent with each 16-point rise. (Qtd. here).

Now the theories with our notes in brackets[]:

• One theory is that men want to marry women who are not as smart as they are. The smarter the women, the less the eligible pool of guys interested in them. [Okay, this makes some sense.]
• A second theory proposes intelligent women are much more likely to be pursuing careers or higher education and thus be less likely to get married at an earlier age. [Come on, the study looked at women up to 51 years old. What exactly is an “earlier age” you sicko?]
• A third theory has it that smarter women hold out for smarter guys, who just happen to be ugly nerds; and in the long run they end up lonely since they don’t want to marry the ugly nerds. [Okay, a reverse sexism theory. Smart guys = ugly nerds]
• A forth theory proposes that the higher a woman’s IQ, the less she would want to get married. [The old “anything I can’t have, I don’t want” theory.]

Interestingly, most of the theories were from the woman’s point of view. How about another one from the man’s point of view? Isn’t it possible that men just don’t want to be married to know-it-alls? I mean it’s bad enough that women want to win every argument, but the thought that they actually would win every argument is untenable. Okay let the gender barbs begin!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 at 1:51 pm by Insider and is filed under Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.