I got to know the friendly bus driver who drove the shuttle bus from the mathematics research institute down the hill to the UC Berkeley campus. I was often the only passenger on the last trip down the hill. Since I lived partway between the last stop and the bus depot, he would drop me off near home, even though he wasn't supposed to.
He was an undergrad who was moonlighting as a bus driver. He was enrolled in a large introductory psychology course, and he told me about some of the more interesting things he learned, including what he learned about the nature-nurture controversy.
He said that when the Stanford-Binet IQ tests were first created, the devisers created a test that they thought would measure intelligence. They tested their first drafts on various populations, and learned that females did better than males on several subtests. That didn't seem right to them, so they revised the test and retested it until they ended up with a test for which males did about as well as females, for all the subpopulations they tested.
Sometime later, while visiting Stanford University, I spent a day in the library tracking down original documents on the creation and evolution of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. There seems to be at least some truth in what the bus driver told me.
Whenever someone tells me that IQ tests prove that men are innately more intelligent than women in some group, I roll my eyes. I don't see how one can legitimately claim anything about gender differences using a test that was manipulated to be gender-neutral (not to mention that the tests don't measure innate ability and the results are influenced by education and experience).
Near the end of the semester, the bus driver told me that his professor said to the class, "I know that there's no data or research that proves that men are smarter than women. But ask yourself, `What does my gut tell me?' In your gut, you know that men are smarter than women. You should trust your gut."
"He said WHAT?" I exclaimed. I was furious that a Berkeley professor, who was supposed to be teaching critical thinking skills, would tell the students to ignore all the data and research they learned about in his class, and just trust their gut (in other words, rely on the prejudices they had learned growing up).
When I'm asked about gender differences on tests, I usually say, "When men do better, they declare that men are genetically superior. When women do better, they rewrite the test."