POLL RELEASES
February 21, 2001
Americans See Women as Emotional and Affectionate, Men As More Aggressive
Gender specific stereotypes persist in recent Gallup poll
by Frank Newport
GALLUP NEWS SERVICE
PRINCETON, NJ - A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans have little difficulty
associating specific personality characteristics with one gender or the other--despite
the existence of at least some social pressures in today's society to view men and
women equally. The poll gave Americans the opportunity to associate particular
characteristics with either men or women, and the results show that even today
Americans are likely to say that the words "emotional," "affectionate," "talkative,"
"patient" and "creative" describe women, while associating characteristics such as
"aggressive" and "courageous" with men. Neither sex is most likely to be described by
the terms "intelligent," "easy-going," and "ambitious."
Here is the basic summary of the results based on responses to the following question: I
would like to ask about some specific characteristics of men and women. For each one I
read, please tell me whether you think it is generally more true of men or more true of
women.
To put it simply, this is not a true statement. In fact, it's a blatantly false concept even before you know Gallup's own poll results, or the polling methodology, or Gallup's agenda. With no further investigation, it just makes no sense that both sexes would agree on which sex is the most "intelligent", "easy going", or "ambitious", particularly when Gallup has already admitted "that Americans have little difficulty associating specific personality characteristics with one gender or the other". But Gallup's very own poll results show the statement "Neither sex is most likely to be described by the terms "intelligent," "easy-going," and "ambitious" to be patently false.
Why would Gallup make a patently false statement which their own poll results readily disputes? Do they hope that nobody will read any further than the first paragraph? Or that the American education system has by now been sufficiently dumbed down that most Americans can't read a poll anyway? Or that just this part of their report will be quoted by mediots who will gladly ignore the actual facts?
In any event, the fact is that Gallup's own data shows that men are 1.4 times more likely than women to believe that men are more ambitious, 1.2 times more likely to believe that men are more easy-going, and twice as likely to believe that men are more intelligent. Conversely, women are just as biased towards their own sex, being 1.1 times more likely to believe that women are more easy-going, 1.3 times more likely that women are more ambitious, and 1.5 times more likely to believe that women are more intelligent.
Is "intelligence" the "controversial" issue that Gallup hoped to avoid? Is political correctness so rampant that they would avoid at all costs the perception that they're accusing men that they're "sexist" because they were twice as likely as women to believe that men are more intelligent than women? Or that women are "sexist" because they're 40% more likely to believe that women are more intelligent );
This is the most significant of all the "gender differences", yet Gallup hoped to bury that fact. Why? There's a serious disconnect between their responsibility to accurately report the news and their destructive agenda. To be precise, we need to understand where American women get their information from that so many of them believe that women are more intelligent than men, and why Gallup assists so greatly in the propagation of that myth.
There isn't a single shred of statistical evidence to support this belief, so where does it come from? Every single standardized test, from coast to coast, country to country, race to race, and sex to sex, shows that men are significantly more intelligent than women. The brain size and brain cell count studies all show that men have a proportionately larger brain than women, which is consistent with the differences in intelligence and test scores and incomes and earning capacity. When charted by race and sex, there is a linear relationship between GRE scores and brain size (r-squared = .89). The measured differences in sports events like the Olympics show a Gaussian Distribution [read: a "bell curve"] that is identical to that for test scores, brain size, and incomes. Yet more than a quarter of men and almost a half of women still believe that women are more intelligent than men.
These aren't the only categories in which the sexes had a significant difference of opinion about their own sex which Gallup failed to adequately report. Men were 1.2 times more likely to believe that men are more aggressive, but women were 1.4 times more likely to believe that women were more aggressive. Men and women agreed with how emotional and talkative women are (90% and 78%, respectively), but men were twice as likely to believe that men were more emotional and 1.1 times as likely to believe that men were more talkative, than women. Men were 1.4 times more likely to believe that men were more courageous, but women were 1.6 times more likely to believe their own sex was. Same with patient: 1.5 times versus 1.1 times. And creative: 3.9 vs. 1.4. Men and women don't even agree on which sex is the most affectionate, with women being twice as likely as men to believe that men are more affectionate, and 10% less likely to believe that women are.
With this obvious built-in bias in the way Gallup reports their data, it's hard to imagine that the pollsters were objective in the way they collected the data. But even if we accept that they were, this is a shocking sex difference. Why would women be half as likely as men to know or understand or accept the facts about the sex differences in intelligence? Or maybe more importantly, why would forty percent of both men and women believe that men and women are of equal intelligence?
Survey Methods
The results below are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national
sample of 1,026 adults, 18 years and older, conducted December 2-4, 2000, For results
based on this sample, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum error
attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting
surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr010221.asp