Thank you so very much teachers for your thinking on why we do not have famous women composers... Sandy B

I have not heard about reason #2 before. Can you cite any reliable sources that discuss this in detail?

It's a well-documented finding in psychology, Morodiene. The distribution of IQ for men is "flatter" than it is for women, although the average IQ is the same for both sexes. This means that there are indeed more male geniuses, as well as more men who are severely retarded.

I've got to run off to a meeting, so I can't dig up any primary sources, but I believe it's talked about in Stephen Pinker's "The Blank Slate" in the chapter on gender differences, and Herrnstein & Wilson's "The Bell Curve" as well.

Of course there are those who would say that methods for testing iq are skewed towards certain characteristics (gender being one) so while not being "wrong", you have to understand what the numbers are saying (are there really more male "genius'" or are there merely more males that exhibit the attributes that an admittedly male dominated society values as genius like)

Plus, has anyone really done any research on whether composers really were what we'd consider "genius" anyway? In other words, does scoring a high IQ actually relate to the ability to create what most would consider meaningful compositions?

Funny but my daughter asked me this very same question about a month ago. I just tell her that if she works hard enough that maybe she could be the first

That is absolutely the crucial question, bitWrangler. I'd have to do some lit searching, but my imperfect memory is that while compositional talent may be slightly or even moderately correlated with IQ, they are by no means overlapping constructs.

As for your first set of concerns, we could have an hours-long debate on what exactly intelligence is and what exactly IQ tests measure. There's not perfect agreement among the leading researchers in the field on that. And certainly the fact that the distributions differ for men and women tells us nothing about the root causes of those differences. Maybe it's genetic/biological. Maybe it's socialization. Nobody knows for sure. It's probably a little of both.

Sometimes it's embarrassing to be in a field where often the best answer you can give is to throw up your hands and say "we don't know."