I've skimmed literature on this before. Did a quick search on my phone, though this doesn't look like the most reputable source:

http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differ...

I'd be interested to read any studies with alternative outcomes. This seems like a well-promulgated meme, regardless of its factuality or not...

This shows some data from one study: http://www.american.com/archive/2010/june-2010/are-there-mor...

Men are overrepresented at the tails of the IQ distribution, women are overrepresented in the middle.

The evidence presented is IQ scores from 1932. Given historical gender biases this not persuasive. Culling scientific evidence from conservative think tank Op-Eds is probably not a best practice...

There are many other data sources, some are linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence - I just linked to the above article because it has a pretty figure and it's not behind an academic paywall.

Maybe most notable is a 1995 paper in Science http://www.sciencemag.org/content/269/5220/41 but it is both behind a paywall and completely devoid of figures! You get the main idea from the abstract, though: Except in tests of reading comprehension, perceptual speed, and associative memory, males typically outnumber females substantially among high-scoring individuals.

Well here is something not behind a paywall: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689999/. This study finds that gender differences among top performers varies by ethnic and national background.

While there may be gender differences among high/low scoring individuals, I resent that that this is treated as a scientific fact when there are limited studies with contradictory findings.

That's an interesting article. I guess it's not as clear cut as many people believe.

Something must be done.

It comes out in a wide variety of measures. Simple ones that people are familiar with are things like Gini coefficients of income among males is more distributed, IQ is more distributed, various incarceration statistics etc.

So while the richest people might be men, the poorest population will also be men.

Or, the people with highest and lowest IQs will be men.

etc.

> source?

Your genome.

And more formally stuff like this:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff...