Abstract
Research from various countries consistently reported an advantage of boys over girls in general knowledge and was also suggestive of some overall trends regarding specific domains of general knowledge that were speculated to stem from biologically differentiated interests. However, results were heterogeneous and, as of yet, had not been evaluated meta-analytically. Moreover, previous research drew on overly homogeneous high-school or undergraduate samples whose representativeness appears problematic; mostly, likely moderators, such as school type, student age or parental education, were also not directly investigated or controlled for. We provide a meta-analytical aggregation of available results regarding sex differences in general knowledge and present new data, investigating the psychometric properties of the General Knowledge Test (GKT), on which previous research primarily relied, and explored sex differences in a large and heterogeneous Austrian high-school student sample (N = 1088). The aggregated sex effect in general knowledge was of medium size in previous research, but differences in specific domains were heterogeneous across countries and only modest at best. Large sex differences in our data could be explained to a large part by school-related moderators (school type, school, student age, parental education) and selection processes. Boys had a remaining advantage over girls that was only small in size and that was consistent with the magnitude of sex differences in general intelligence. Analysis of the GKT yielded no evidence of biologically differentiated interests, but of a specific interest in the humanities among girls. In conclusion, previous research likely overestimated sex differences in general knowledge.
Highlights
Sex differences in cognitive abilities and intelligence are a much investigated topic, with a host of studies documenting an advantage of women in verbal tasks and perceptual speed, but an advantage of men in visuospatial and complex numerical abilities [1]
Published studies that reported sex differences in general knowledge as assessed with the General Knowledge Test (GKT) or instruments that could be readily likened to the GKT scheme, i.e., covered its lower-order domains or higher-order factors, were eligible for inclusion
Sex differences in general knowledge were consistently of at least nearly medium size (i.e., | d |$0.50), but differences in domains varied across studies in size and in direction (Table 1)
Summary
Sex differences in cognitive abilities and intelligence are a much investigated topic, with a host of studies documenting an advantage of women in verbal tasks and perceptual speed, but an advantage of men in visuospatial and complex numerical abilities [1]. Evidence points towards an advantage of men over women in fluid intelligence (Gf) [2,3,4], and in crystallized intelligence (Gc) and general knowledge [5,6]. Evidence from the standardization samples of information subtests of the Wechsler intelligence tests since 1958 consistently points towards an advantage of men in general knowledge [6,7]. The original GKT consists of 216 items with an open response format that cover 19 different domains of knowledge. Short forms, translations, and variants of the GKT were used in a number of further studies [10,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
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