UNDERSTANDING CREATIVITY, INNOVATION,
KNOWLEDGE NETWORK AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
2007
PROJECT REPORT
ON
“ARE WOMEN MORE CREATIVE THAN MEN?”
Rohit Kumar Mehar
DATE: 03 MARCH, 2007
Report Submitted To: Prof. Anil K. Gupta
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Research: Method and Controversies
My first impression while taking this project was that it would be a easy project as people
have their opinion about this issue and it would be quite simple to find a pattern in the
way people think about it. But, when I started talking to men and women and their
opinion about creativity, I got almost unanimous responses where each sex people
believed they are superior than the other sex (all the women replied that they are more
creative, 95% of men think they are more creative). Every person had his or her opinion
or own definition of creativity and it spanned from intelligence to art to god gifts or
something which cannot be defined. This made me go back to my hypothesis and work
out a way where I can ask people to objectively grade men and women over creativity
and provide logic for it. I tried to define creativity and closest I could find is
“Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas
and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.”
It has widespread interpretations and creativity in behavioral science varies from
creativity in social psychology or cognitive sciences. It is attributed to divine
intervention, cognitive processes, social environment, chances and personal traits. It
made it even more difficult to quantify creativity to do a comparative test.
I searched psychology papers and came across this very interesting research paper, which
tries to differentiate between creative and psychotic people. It defined creativity as a
function of intelligence of a person and latent inhibition. Latent inhibition can be defined
as non ability to focus or pay attention to things other than the main thing. The paper
through empirical study proves that creativity of a person can be characterized by high IQ
and very low level of latent inhibition. As low latent inhibition would allow person to
focus on other things and high IW level would allow the person to process this
information in a productive and creative manner. I found this definition quite intriguing
and decided to use this as my test hypothesis as there are specific measures defined for
quantifying intelligence through IQ levels. There is high controversy regarding there
usability but they are used nonetheless. I decide to take latent inhibition as constant as it
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is something which cannot be measured and can be considered to be same for both the
sexes. Hence, this research paper helped me scale down my research objective to a
quantifiable question:
“Are women more intelligent than men??”
I asked the same set of person whom I surveyed previously this question and there was
quite a significant change in the responses. 98% of men think that they are more
intelligent than men, which is 3% more than the creativity survey and only 70% women
think they are more intelligent than men, which is quite staggering as all of them initially
said that they are more creative than men.
This topic has a history of controversies, most famously known is Larry Summers, who
was the president of Harvard Business School and had to resign due to his sexist concerns
shown about the small number of female scientists.
He gave three hypotheses, which believe contained all the reasons for such low
representations:
1. High Powered Job Hypotheses – Summers thought that only men are able to do
jobs which require high determination, time and efforts as women have other jobs
to perform and cannot devote significant amount of time and require flexible
timings.
2. Variability Hypotheses – In this hypothesis, Summers said that men are more
intelligent than women on average and that might be a very prominent reason for
there not performing well in science.
3. Discrimination Hypotheses – In this hypothesis, Summers said that there might
be discrimination against women as men are in charge of recruitment and they
would like to hire only men.
These statements generated huge furor against Larry Summers and people found it very
difficult to comprehend that the major reason for low representation is low intelligence
and not discrimination as it is always considered. I searched on internet to figure out
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whether similar research ahs been conducted earlier, if there is what were the results and
the logic involved.
Result: Fact and Counter facts
I found this very interesting research done by Dr. Paul Irwing. He tried to test the test the
hypotheses that men are more intelligent than women. For this he used SAT score of over
80000 university students, which is a well known test for judging IQ level and tried to see
any patterns. Research results were very staggering in terms of difference between IQ
scores of mean and women. There was overall 5 IQ points difference in favor of men.
Average SAT score is around 100, but above score of 120, there were twice as many men
than women and if we take score higher than 170, there were thrice as many men as
women. Another interesting fact was there was no difference between men and women
below age and women. This might be accounted to the fact that at this time, they choose
career preferences, which can have a direct bearing on the SAT scores. Also not only
there were more men in higher IQ point brackets, but also there was a much skewed
distribution in favor of men towards highly intelligent people. There were many major
researches conducted on the similar thing which gave more or less similar results.
But, deriving our conclusion based only my very limited sample, which lacked logic in
most of the cases or these studies, would not be right. There are various counter facts,
which could cause suspicion about the same. Some of them are –
1. Ever Diminishing Variability – Although there is a huge difference in SAT scores
of men and women but this difference has been decreasing in previous years. In
past 15 years, ratio of boys to girls having score of 170+ has decreased from 12:1
to 3:1. Genetic structure of girls is not expected to change in a short time span of
15 years, hence one major reason for this change could be social equality
provided to girls only in later years, which has allowed them to grow and show
there potential in tests like SAT.
2. There is a very high dependence of SAT scores on the career choices made by the
candidates. As men candidates are much likely to choose a career in mathematics
and science, which constitute a major portion of test make them more likely to
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score well, whereas women who prefer arts and commerce as there career choice
find it very difficult to compete.
3. There have been studies conducted, which do not deny superior intelligence of
men in previous years but rather than attributing it to high IQ of men, they show
that major reason for this difference is the social and cultural discrimination
against women, which has not allowed them to grow.
After running through all this facts, I still could not settle this issue. The major reason
from this study is that because men have higher IQ as proved by SAT scores, they are
more creative. But creativity is not only about IQ, it also has latent inhibition, which is as
important as IQ. SAT does account for social factors but its high emphasis on math and
logical reasoning make it highly unfair towards women. But, at present there are no other
mechanism to compare men and women.
Other important fact is there is a huge history of great creative women. But, it cannot be
used to deny the results of research as there are examples on for men too and creative
women example form a very small proportion of total. Also, latent inhibition is not
constant; we just cannot measure it at present.
Conclusion
It is very difficult to conclude a research of these sorts as there are plenty of counter
arguments available for both the opinions. But, I believe rather than discussing about
superior creativity of one sex over the other sex, its important to nurture and harness the
creativity in an individual irrespective of his/her sex. There can be many ways, which can
nourish creativity such as, building motivation especially internal motivation, as
determination can help one go mile, encouraging people to share ideas and take risks,
promoting supportable beliefs about creativity and providing equal opportunity to all who
are creative. This can really help us in bringing many creative ideas to the actual
implementation stage and provide many productive solutions.
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