Male vs Female IQ: Are There Intelligence Differences?

If men and women had clearly different average intelligence, a modern IQ test should make the answer obvious. Instead, the overall scores are remarkably close—while some of the abilities underneath those scores show more noticeable differences.

Men and women do not appear to differ meaningfully in average overall intelligence. Large studies and meta-analyses generally find either no difference or a very small average difference in Full Scale IQ or general cognitive ability. The more interesting pattern appears below the total score: males tend to perform better on some visual-spatial tasks, while females tend to perform better on processing-speed and some verbal or memory tasks.

That distinction matters because an average IQ score combines several abilities. Two groups can end up with nearly identical overall IQs while showing different profiles on the subtests that contribute to them.

What Does a Large WISC Meta-Analysis Show?

A 2022 meta-analysis examined 79 studies involving 46,605 school-aged children tested with versions of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC).

Across 48 studies that reported Full Scale IQ, males scored slightly higher on average—but the effect was described by the researchers as practically negligible. The estimated difference was equivalent to about 1.4 IQ points. When the analysis was restricted to newer WISC versions, the gap fell to about 0.8 IQ points and was no longer statistically significant.

Fluid intelligence showed the same basic pattern: little to no meaningful male-female difference. That is important because fluid reasoning is closely related to what people usually mean when they talk about general problem-solving ability.

Where Do Males Tend to Score Higher?

The most consistent male advantages appear on some visual-spatial tasks, especially tasks that require mentally manipulating shapes or spatial information.

In the 2022 WISC meta-analysis, the broad visual-processing advantage for males was equivalent to roughly 3 IQ points. Block Design—a task that requires reconstructing visual patterns with colored blocks—showed a recurring male advantage across different WISC versions.

Other research has also found male advantages on mental-rotation tasks. These are narrower abilities, however. A person can be excellent at spatial rotation without having an unusually high Full Scale IQ, just as someone can have a high IQ without being especially strong at mental rotation.

This is why understanding what IQ actually measures requires looking beyond one total number.

Where Do Females Tend to Score Higher?

The clearest female advantage in the same meta-analysis appeared in processing speed. Girls and women often score higher on tasks such as Coding, which requires rapidly matching symbols to numbers or other visual targets.

The 2022 analysis found a particularly noticeable female advantage on Coding, while the difference on Symbol Search was smaller but still favored females. Females also showed a very small advantage on short-term memory in some analyses.

Verbal differences depend heavily on the kind of verbal task being measured. A broad review of cognitive sex differences notes that females often perform better on reading, writing, and some forms of verbal fluency, while differences on vocabulary or general verbal knowledge are smaller and less consistent.

A Huge UK Study Found Almost No Difference in Average Reasoning

One of the strongest illustrations comes from a nationally representative UK sample of more than 320,000 students ages 11 to 12.

Girls averaged 2.2 standard-score points higher in verbal reasoning. Boys averaged only 0.7 points higher in quantitative reasoning. Nonverbal reasoning differed by just 0.3 points in favor of girls.

Those are tiny mean differences in a sample large enough to detect almost anything statistically. The researchers concluded that the average reasoning differences were too small to explain large male-female differences in later educational outcomes.

What About Adults?

Adult research is somewhat more mixed, partly because different studies use different tests and different ways of extracting general intelligence. Some Wechsler standardization studies have reported a small male advantage in Full Scale IQ or the general factor, while others have found essentially no difference in general intelligence.

A March 2026 meta-analysis gathered 2,092 effect sizes representing 15,990,325 people. Among adults, men scored an average of 2.57 IQ points higher on general-ability tests (95% CI 1.91–3.23). The authors also reported very high heterogeneity across studies and noted that it remains unclear whether the difference reflects general intelligence (g) itself. Within children, most tested abilities showed no sex difference, with narrower exceptions such as technical knowledge, mechanical reasoning, mathematics, reading comprehension, and processing speed.

That newer result adds nuance rather than overturning the broader picture. A roughly 2.6-point adult mean difference is small beside the much larger variation within each sex, and the size of the gap changes by age and by the abilities included in a test battery.

A Cambridge Handbook review of the field concluded that the overall evidence does not support one sex being generally more intelligent than the other. The authors emphasized substantial overlap between male and female distributions and more meaningful differences in particular cognitive abilities.

So the safest summary is not “men have higher IQ” or “women have higher IQ.” It is that average general intelligence is very similar, while cognitive profiles can differ.

Do Males Show More Extreme Scores?

This is a different question from average IQ. Several large datasets have found greater male variability: male scores are spread out slightly more, which can produce more males at both the high and low ends even when the average is almost identical.

In the 320,000-person UK reasoning sample, boys showed greater score variability on verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal reasoning. Boys were overrepresented at both tails of most distributions.

A separate analysis of two population-wide Scottish samples likewise found greater male variability in general intelligence among 11-year-olds, including above the middle of the distribution.

But greater variability is not universal across every test, country, age, or ability. It is better treated as a recurring statistical pattern than as a rule that predicts any individual.

Why Might Specific Cognitive Differences Exist?

There is no single accepted explanation. Reviews of cognitive sex differences point to a combination of biological and environmental influences: developmental hormones, brain development, education, practice, cultural expectations, stereotype effects, interests, and the experiences boys and girls are encouraged to pursue.

A 2014 review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences emphasized that many cognitive sex differences change across time and across countries. Some differences have narrowed, while others have remained relatively stable. That makes simple “biology versus culture” explanations too crude.

The broader principle is similar to the one discussed in Is IQ Genetic or Learned?: biological and environmental influences interact rather than operating as independent boxes.

Can You Predict Someone's Intelligence From Their Sex?

No. The overlap between male and female IQ distributions is enormous. Even where a particular subtest shows an average difference, people within each sex vary much more than the difference between the averages.

A woman can score exceptionally high on spatial reasoning. A man can have exceptional verbal fluency or processing speed. Group averages are useful for research, but they are weak predictors of one person's cognitive profile.

The same warning applies whenever IQ differences are discussed between populations. The planned guide to IQ differences between groups looks more broadly at genes, environment, measurement, and why group means should not be turned into individual judgments.

So, Who Has the Higher IQ: Men or Women?

Neither sex has a meaningful overall IQ advantage that is consistently large enough to justify calling one more intelligent. The 2022 WISC meta-analysis in children found a Full Scale IQ difference of roughly 1.4 points overall and less than one point with newer tests. Large population data likewise show extremely small differences in overall reasoning.

The more defensible conclusion is that males and females have largely similar general intelligence with some average differences in specific abilities. Those specific differences are scientifically interesting—but they are not the same thing as one sex being smarter.

Check Your Own Approximate IQ

Your sex cannot estimate your personal IQ. If you want to sample your own verbal, logical, numerical, and visual-spatial reasoning, Cognitive Train's free IQ-Style Test gives a non-clinical, approximate estimate based on your performance on the test itself.

For individual measures of memory, attention, processing speed, and reasoning, browse Cognitive Train's brain tests and cognitive assessments.

The Bottom Line

Male and female average IQ scores are much more similar than popular stereotypes suggest. The strongest differences appear in particular cognitive abilities: males tend to score higher on some visual-spatial tasks, while females tend to score higher on processing-speed and some verbal tasks. Male scores may also be somewhat more variable in some large datasets.

Those patterns describe group averages, not individuals. For more on IQ scores and what they mean, browse the Intelligence & IQ collection, see Average IQ, or explore Cognitive Train's brain training and cognitive training tools.