Are women really smarter than men?

FEBRUARY 26, 2015 BY NIRAN ADEDOKUN 

   

 

Niran Adedokun

I came about the impression that women were inferior to men pretty early in life. I think much earlier than I even learnt the difference between my left and right arms. I am sure you find that curious but it is true.

No one sat me down to tutor me on how to disrespect women but there were things around me that suggested that God meant for women to be subordinate to men.

I have a faint recollection of a story which went around me and my peers about this situation back in the day. It was to the effect that God sealed the inferiority of women at creation by endowing men with nine bones and women only seven. That story nailed the superiority of the man as far as we were concerned and I walked in the company of that complex for a while.

In the environment where I grew up, women who had all girl-children were mostly unfulfilled and depressed. I knew men who did not stop marrying woman after woman until someone gave them a male child. I knew someone who only stopped after wife number three gave birth to the second girl. By then, he was the father of eight girls from three women, none of which he wanted to associate with. Women who gave birth to boys walked with some pride and were an evident source of envy of women who were not so “lucky.” The girl-child and by extension the woman were not just to be reckoned with.

The first upset I got was in the early days of my primary education. We went to public primary school in those days and it was a place where we met people from everywhere. I came at the top of my class most of the time, which was not surprising being the son of a teacher. But anytime I did not make it to the top of my class, a young Ebira girl known as Amina shoved me off. Amina, even at our very tender age, was a very pretty girl whose father was a policeman. But this girl’s physical attraction was nowhere near her brilliance. When it came to academics, Amina was the only one who gave me the fright. And it remained so until we got into Primary 4 when she left because of her father’s transfer.

That gave my tender mind a new perceptive of the abilities of the female gender. I was sure that my dear friend was going somewhere to happen. Unfortunately, years later, I would meet my friend attending to patrons at a petrol station in one of the cities in Nigeria. Apparently, she lost her father at some point and that derailed her education as her mum could no longer afford to educate her and her siblings. I went away with a bitter heart on the day we met, 20 years after the stiff competition of our early lives. A sad example of how this society terminates the destinies of people. Really sad. But that is a story for another day.

My early-life encounter with Amina prepared me for the reality that people of the “weaker sex” were neither dimwits nor pushovers. And as I grew older, I noticed the way my mother and some of her close friends held their own. Quite a number of women in this generation found themselves as single mothers at some point in their lives and nothing but their strength and smartness could make their children turn out well.

By the time I concluded secondary education, where I met a number of outstanding girls, I was sure that whoever invented the story about the weakness of women was deluded, at least from the intellectual standpoint!

As an undergraduate, I developed total respect for the female gender. In fact, I went the extra mile not to underrate any of them, regardless of age. Even now, as often as I have to, I counsel my male friends never to lead themselves into believing that they have stupid sisters, girlfriends or wives, even if the woman chooses to play stupid.

Although many men live in the illusion of their unequalled smartness, as I advanced in age, I have come to the personal conviction that the average woman has learnt to ignore and amuse herself at the superiority complex from which a lot of men suffer.

Take infidelity amongst men for instance. While most men think that they get away because of the stupid lies that they tell, my take is that most often, women see through those lies and let sleeping dogs lie just for the sake of peace. And a lot of times, those lies eventually blow up in the faces of men.

On the flip side however, if a woman decides to cheat on her spouse, he would most definitely be dead and buried before catching her at a lie or discovering the dalliance. We just must accept that the fairer sex is ahead of us on this front.

Now, this is not just the ranting of a subdued man. Scientists and psychologists have pondered over the difference between the intelligence of men and women for decades.

As a result of this, there have been as varied conclusions to this debate as there have been attempts to unravel the mystery. One thing that most of these researches agree to however is that as much as modernity has increased the capacity of all humans to become better at whatever they do, women are moving faster at this than men.

One study that takes this further and indeed solicits that we surrender our world to women if we were to make progress is by Daniel Amen, an American psychiatrist and New York Times bestselling author. In a study which he described as the “largest brain-imaging analysis ever conducted to evaluate the differences between male and female brains”, Amen said his team made stunning discoveries.

In an article titled, “Is It Time to Let Women Take the Wheel?”, published by huffingtonpost.com, Amen explained: “…Women showed significantly increased cerebral blood flow in 112 of the 128 regions…This means that women generally have more brain activity than men. But what fascinated me as a psychiatrist and brain imaging specialist wasn’t that women’s brains were much more active than men’s. What I found particularly interesting were the specific areas of the brain that were more active in women – areas that show women may indeed be better equipped to lead our world towards meaningful change than men.”

Amen said that the prefrontal cortex (part of the brain which is also known as the CEO) of women is much more active than men. This area of the brain governs things like judgment, forethought, organisation, planning, empathy, impulse control and learning from the mistakes you make, all of which are the very “qualities needed to successfully manage a company, lead a nation, mediate crisis, and get people working together towards a common goal.”

He explained that increased brain activity allows women exhibit greater strengths in the areas of empathy, intuition, collaboration, self-control and appropriate worry, all of which are hints of smartness. A recent article in TheAtlantis.com also suggested that companies with female CEOs were outperforming companies with male CEOs by nearly 50 per cent!

Just last August, American First Lady, Michelle Obama, joined the smartness debate. While addressing the US-Africa Leaders’ Summit, she joked that “women are smarter than men” and advised women not to “waste the spotlight. It is temporary and life is short, and change is needed.”

So I am wondering, can we say this about the Nigerian woman? Would increasing the opportunities available to women turn the tide of things for Nigeria?

• Twitter:@niranadedokun
• source: Punch