New Proof Shows Women Are Smarter Than Men

Since the IQ test was invented a century ago, males and females have been taking it, and the former have outscored the latter, often by as much as five points. (If you’re wondering how much difference five IQ points can make, you’ve never tried to get your kid into the gifted program at school.) But that’s all in the past. Drumroll, please! According to “world-renowned expert in IQ testing” James Flynn (as in the “Flynn effect”), as of yesterday, women are outscoring men. Listen to this! “In the past 100 years, the IQ scores of both men and women have risen,” Flynn says, “but women’s have risen faster.” Take that, you men, you!

And why, you might wonder, are women getting smarter faster? Because we are better at doing more than one thing at once, according to one theory, which holds that the challenges of simultaneously raising families and having careers have simply caused us to outstrip guys, who are still focusing on … I’m sorry, what exactly is it that they do? Oh, that’s right; check the fluids in the car. Yet another theory holds that women are smarter because they can find the horseradish on the refrigerator door, where it is sitting in plain sight, even though men can’t. To be absolutely fair, when men were smarter there were many fewer condiments on the market, as the 480 different kinds of mustard presently lining the mustard shelf at your neighborhood grocer prove. (Heinz et al. haven’t managed to mess around with ketchup the same way. They are mucking with mayonnaise, though. Chipotle mayo! Pomegranate mayo! Dijonnaise! But I digress. Doesn’t that sound like something a smart man would say? )

Does IQ matter, though? Hell yeah, IQ matters. As it happens, “Does IQ matter?” is the sort of question that the losing gender in the IQ wars always poses; witness the mustard-like proliferation, while women were the dumber sex, of various sorts of intelligence, like “EQ,” also known as “emotional intelligence,” and “CQ,” or creative intelligence, or even “SQ,” or “spiritual intelligence,” which sounds like an oxymoron, which is a word I just learned now that I’m smarter than you.

But hey, let’s be civilized about this. It’s not as though when you guys had the upper hand, you ever belittled our intelligence, or made up religions where it was our duty to be subservient to you, or bound our feet so we could only teeter along after you, or stuffed us into corsets so we were prone to swoon. And now that we’re your superiors, we fully intend to be every bit as sensitive and generous and caring toward you, our inferiors, as you were with us. Let’s start with this: Find your own damned horseradish from now on. Oh, and the fluids in the car? We always knew how to check those. That was just a ploy to get you to stop watching those damned John Candy movie reruns so we could catch a few minutes of Downton Abbey for a change.