Can an intelligent woman be a threat to male ego? Unfortunately, even today men fear women who are better than them in traits that according to stereotypes are considered to be 'masculine', such as intelligence and power.
Researchers at the University of Buffalo, California Lutheran University, and the University of Texas came to conclude that even though most men claim they want to date intelligent women, they actually don’t. During this process of the study, men were asked if they'd be comfortable dating a woman who's smarter than them. 86% of them said they were. But when the intelligence test scores of men and women were announced, most men said that they were not attracted to the women who had intelligence scores higher than theirs. So much for that 86%.
Another study outlined in Psychology Today confirmed that the same results came from similar tests. Intriguingly, even when men had to merely imagine a woman who had outperformed them on the intelligence test, they claimed that made her less attractive.
Of course, this doesn’t affect all men and that there a lot of great guys out there happy to date women who are more intelligent than themselves. But these studies' result is devastating, considering the percentage of men who feel threatened by women's intelligence.
Even worse, these men said they would happily date an intelligent woman and then when some of the women outperformed them, most of those men claimed that they weren’t attracted to the intelligent ones.
This is ridiculous, but it's not men nor women's fault. It's the fault of society and its stereotypes, which make people assume that each gender should have certain traits and nothing should ever destroy this 'balance'.
But women can be intelligent, as men can be stupid, and there's nothing wrong with being with someone more intelligent than you, whatever their gender is. We need to realize it before claiming that we have achieved equality.
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