The Question Is: Are Men Smarter or Dumber Than Women? : The Answer: Yes!

The great intelligence debate has been settled. It turns out the test in high test scores stands for testosterone.

A study issued this week shows that men dominate the upper 1% of the IQ spectrum. But the same study shows men also are clumped down at the bottom.

To the question, “Are men smarter or dumber than women?” the answer seems to be yes.

Informal experts in human behavior, however--female bartenders, mortuary managers and psychologists--say they’ve long known men’s brains are different from women’s. Which type of intelligence is better often comes down to which side of the Y chromosome you’re on.

“They’re both wonderful,” said Heidi Yellen, 47, an educational therapist and psycho-diagnostician with Yellen and Associates.

She said men’s brains and women’s brains need each other. Men tend to want solutions to problems, she said, while women are more involved in process.

“If everybody was involved in process,” she said, “there would only be shades of gray. If everybody was solution-oriented, there would only be black and white.”

Sue Lepisto had no easy answer to why men tend to congregate at the extremes. But she said she has noticed the trend in her work as head of counseling at Taft High School in Woodland Hills.

She said the school’s academic decathlon team has traditionally been dominated by boys. At the same time, most special education programs have a majority of male students, she said.

Yellen, who works with students suffering from attention deficit disorder, said she has seen the same thing but is not sure it reflects the true state of affairs in the classroom. She said boys with behavior problems tend to act out publicly, disrupting class, while girls act out internally.

“Very often, females have a depressive component” to their classroom failures, she said. Because they are quiet, they may never be identified as suffering from learning problems.

There was no agreement among the women as to why men congregated at the top of the IQ charts, but several blamed environmental factors such as cultural attitudes and classroom teaching techniques that put girls at a disadvantage.

Lepisto cited a girls-only math class at Thousand Oaks High School in Ventura County as proof of classroom bias. The girls in the class did better than girls in mixed classes, she said.

“I don’t know if there are differences in how smart we are, but there are differences in how we think,” said Mary Lou Garcia, 35, office manager at Lorenzen Mortuary.

She doesn’t see gender differences in how people make funeral arrangements, but they arise in a thousand ways every day, from the most serious to the most trivial.

“If you tell someone, your husband or your boyfriend, to clean the house, to you that means floors and curtains and everything,” she said. “To men, that means big things sitting out. He doesn’t quite get it when you say ‘yikes.’ ”

Garcia said she doubts society will ever be rid of stereotypes that contribute to gender differences in intelligence and elsewhere. No matter what is taught in school, attitudes are built on what children see around them. It will always be that way, Garcia said, “unless you live in a bubble.”

Perhaps, but Delene George, bartender at the Woodlake Bowl lounge, has seen differences narrowing.

“Women have come a long way,” she said, noting that they are more willing to speak out and challenge men intellectually than in the past. Whether these changes in behavior will eventually surface in intelligence tests is unclear.

But George is enjoying the changes. She says men are at last being forced to acknowledge their own shortcomings. Based on a dozen years mixing drinks, she has found that “men are just as gossipy as women.”

She has heard male beer drinkers chuckle about the way other patrons are dressed, and heard their lame pickup lines for too long to believe the X chromosome alone carries the gene for cattiness.

Some gender differences among the elbow-benders at the Woodlake lounge do remain. Men tend to dominate the ranks of the “jerks” who have been kicked out of the bar. Or in bowling alley parlance, “eighty-sixed.”

Women are moving up in that category too. She told the story about the female customer who came in, had some beers, stole another woman’s husband and hit the road. “She’s still traveling,” George said.

Most of the women said they and their husbands had made accommodations to the differences in their brain functions.

“Our strengths are different,” said Yellen, who is in business with her husband of 26 years. “I’m very detail-oriented. He looks more at concepts and the big picture.”

She thinks it’s the way men and women are built.

“Females are designed to be the moms. You have to be organized to raise children.”

Perhaps that’s why men clean house so poorly. They’re too busy thinking globally.

The debate can only be taken so far, however. Asked whether it was the fact that their female and male brains made a good match that brought them together, Heidi Yellen scoffed. “There was just a real, basic, physical attraction to begin with.”

At least this time, the brain stuff was secondary.