I think that the ASVAB was designed as a job-choice tool is more of a problem than that it was designed as a military job-choice tool.
Found something about gender bias on this test:
"However, many widely used standardized test scores - ranging from the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) and beyond - also reflect substantial differences based on gender. Minority females suffer a double jeopardy as they often score lower than both white females and males of their own racial or ethnic group. Nonetheless, the law regarding both gender issues and combined gender and race issues is largely undeveloped. Only one lawsuit, Sharif v New York State Education Department, " has been brought to challenge any use of a standardized test on the grounds of gender bias. Legal scholars have only recently begun to devote attention to this issue and have focused on Sharif. 2 Virtually no attention has been focused on the particular issues raised in connection with minority girls and women."
This is from a paper published in 2013 in Berkeley's Journal of Gender, Law, and Science. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Well, ok, then.
"Males have only a marginal advantage in mean levels of g (less than 7% of a standard deviation) from the ASVAB and AFQT, but substantially greater variance. Among the top 2% AFQT scores, there were almost twice as many males as females. These differences could provide a partial basis for sex differences in intellectual eminence."
Now if we only knew the AFQT scores for, say, computer programmers. Oh, wait, we kinda do (http://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/asvab/asvab-and-ai...).
Air Force-wise, Electronic signals intelligence requires a G72, Cyber Systems Operations and Cyber Security requires G64. The ASVAB score is a percentile,
"Thus, an AFQT score of 90 indicates that the examinee scored as well as or better than 90% of the nationally-representative sample of 18 to 23 year old youth. An AFQT score of 50 indicates that the examinee scored as well as or better than 50% of the nationally-representative sample." (http://official-asvab.com/understand_coun.htm)
So being smarter than 65-70% allows you into those jobs.
(I am, by the way, loving Fig. 1. If I'm reading this right, "Auto and shop information" is a better predictor of g than "General science" knowledge.
"Participants were administered the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) which has 10 subtests: science, arithmetic, word knowledge, para- graph comprehension, numerical operations, coding speed, auto and shop information, mathematics knowl- edge, mechanical comprehension, and electronics infor- mation."
Yeah, that's the ASVAB I remember.
"Four of the subtests comprise the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) which includes only the more general, less vocationally-specific tests: arithme- tic, word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, and mathematics knowledge."
Well, at least intelligence, as defined, is less vocationally specific.
Aha! Table 1!
Someone please correct my understanding here if I've missed anything.
The male mean AFQT89 score was 38.7, the female mean was 38.2. The standard deviations were 30.1 and 27.7, respectively. (Wait, what?) The male-female standard deviation ratio was 1.09.
So those are the kinds of numbers we're talking about.