The more intelligent a woman is, the less likely she is to have children

[Wuldric]

From the Times, today

"Satoshi Kanazawa, a researcher at the London School of Economics, has begun positing evidence that the more intelligent women are, the less likely they are to seek offspring. Kanazawa analysed Britain?s National Child Development Study and discovered that high intellect correlated with an early resolve toward, and lifelong pursuit of, childlessness.
Among females, an increase of 15 IQ points decreased the odds of their becoming a mother by a quarter. When he added controls for economics and education, the results were identical: youthful intelligence was a predictor of childlessness."

The article is a bit rubbish, in many ways, not least of which is referring to women who choose to have children as 'breeders'. But it is interesting to read that the latest estimates suggest that a quarter of British women of childbearing age will never have a baby, and by and large, it is the intelligent women who forego children.

Thoughts?

Being a medic, as well, I think.

Probably lots of jobs.

I have had five so clearly am thick as a plank!

Seriously though, there are many careers which take such a long time to get established that if you waited till they were fully established to have children, the chances are that your fertility will be reduced. I remember a friend struggling through medicine with a newborn and in the end having to live away from him during the week and only seeing him at weekends which is a desparately hard position for a mother to be in. It all worked out fine in the end but not everyone would want to be in that position. Medicine and Law are two careers in particular, which take a long time to get started and I suspect if men's fertility dropped at the same rate as women's there would be sabbaticals in place as well as better hours. But as it is, women are competing with men and having to make one type of sacrifice or the other.

'Have you ever seen the film Idiocracy?

In a nutshell, more intelligent/affluent couples wait to have children, then realize they have left it too late, and are bred out by stupid people who have hoards and hoards of children. It's actually quite funny.'

That's not a film, it's RL.

I think there is a correlation between the number of women who go to university, pursue a career, financial independence and a decent stable relationship being unable to have any, or as many children as those who choose a different path because of the time taken to achieve these things.

This is not the same as saying clever women chose childlesness.

That is a major flaw in the research.

The nurse at my gps surgery said I should take ibubrofen for a couple of days and see how it is..... I am not full of faith in her......

Will the ibuprofen make you more intelligent?

Doh wrong thread.... boredom of broken leg has addled my brain.....I also have a child

I don't think it's necessarily all about choice. I've got some vague semblance of a career because I've never been with anyone who's even considered wanting to settle down with me, let alone have children. I have a couple of other friends like that (who do have high-flying careers, which mine isn't) - they'd have definitely gone down the children route, but for one of them, it just hasn't happened, for the other, he walked out when they were engaged.

The fact is that this debate is still framed about women. There is no framing for men. It isn't really questioned or examined as to when or why men have babies. It just isn't that big a deal. And that demonstrates how much responsibility is still laid at the feet of women in a way that men never have to contend with. I also think it is another way of pitting women against women.

Absolutely.

Though, I suspect there is less of an exciting pattern with men. I could be wrong. But I can't think of so many external pressures on men that might account for the correlations they've found with women.

Piss off. How dare you (professor) associate my iq with my womb?! Your plainly thinking with your ass though.

Lies lies and damn statistics.

Strikes me as trite research. How does anyone benefit from it? I know lots of "intelligent" women with and lots of "less intelligent" women without children.

I have to agree.

In theory, I usually think that researching all sorts of things is valuable, because you often don't quite know until you get into the research how it is going to work.

Maybe if we lived in a world where men and women were treated equally as parents and where intelligence in men and women was treated equally, this research would pass without any comment. But given we don't, I do think it's as scallops says, it's one more thing pitting women against women.

Funny tho as most governments think its the dumb women that procreate....

Yeah, almost like this (presumably government-funded) research is playing into their hands ...

Interesting stuff.

The article wasn't about leaving children until later, and then finding out that later meant too late. It was about clearly and consciously electing never to have children.

The breeders comment was not a quote of someone dreadful - it'ss here:

'Being self-selectingly childfree does not mean that one is inevitably off doing incredible things. However, it does tend to imply that someone is doing what they want. The more froth-mouthed breeders love to argue that the childless are infantile ? and some of us do indeed enjoy playing up to this ?I am my own child? stereotype. However, this ignores the one golden fact of the nipperless existence: you?re allowed your own adult life.'

IKnew, the summary claims to have corrected for economics and education. I d

...I don't know the methodology for that, though.

The evidence of the women in my group studying a particular subject at Oxbridge seems to bear this out. The very brightest have few children. Personal choice, of course, but it is sad for the country's gene pool.

But there's a difference between, say, having 1-2 children vs 3-4 and deciding at an early age (OP, what was the age in the study?) not to have children.

Globally, more education for girls means fewer children and I believe that is a good thing.

There is an appalling tendency to confuse education with intelligence, especially in the UK (just see this thread!). If they claim to have 'corrected' for that, I'd love to know how they have done it, since statisticians have been wrestling with that question for decades!
Until there are better ways to establish intelligence, these kind of studies are inherently flawed.

I think one can "clearly and consciously" elect to remain childfree, and still be subject to various causal influences that are correlated with higher IQ.

Or perhaps it's more the reverse is true, that lower IQ is more correlated with not having as much real choice to remain childfree.

Isn't IQ itself correlated with class/income indicators (even though it was intended not to be)? So it's possible that people in lower income groups are under more societal pressure to conform and have children, and perhaps if you have lower IQ you may genuinely be less able to access/use contraception reliably? Or people with higher IQ might be more likely to articulate a particular desire at a young age.

I'd be interested to know the underlying causal factors for this trend, but result in an IQ test is in no way an intrinsic measure.

brdgrl isn't it the case that success in education and IQ are fairly strongly correlated? I would agree that IQ is only a measure of performance on an IQ test, and not a reliable proxy for "intellegence" which is much more difficult to quantify.

The only women (3) in my friendship group who have children, so far, are also the ones with PhDs, including one with an academic career at Cambridge. Not that that proves anything!

I'm happy to both acknowledge that IQ is not everything, and to say that this is still an interesting (if not very surprising) correlation.

Facebook is a wonderful tool for keeping abreast of the lives of friends acquaintances, and friends-of-friends, and I'd say that there looks to be a correlation between "years of education" and "age at which you start to have children".