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Notes -
On that topic, Emil Kirkegaard has a post about sex differences in rationality. It speaks about a test called the Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) which seeks to measure tendency towards rational thinking, with a higher total CART score implying higher performance on the test.
A 2016 book by Keith Stanovich found on the topic of sex differences: "[I]t can be seen that the total score on the entire CART full form was higher for males than for females in both samples and the mean difference corresponded to a moderate effect size of 0.52 and 0.65, respectively. ... Moving down the table, we see displayed the sex differences for each of the twenty subtests within each of the two samples. In thirty-eight of the forty comparisons the males outperformed the females, although this difference was not always statistically significant. There was one statistically significant comparison where females outperformed males: the Temporal Discounting subtest for the Lab sample (convergent with Dittrich & Leipold, 2014; Silverman, 2003a, 2003b). The differences favoring males were particularly sizable for certain subtests: the Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning subtest, the Reflection versus Intuition subtest, the Practical Numeracy subtest, and the Financial Literacy and Economic Knowledge subtest. The bottom of the table shows the sex differences on the four thinking dispositions for each of the two samples. On two of the four thinking dispositions scales—the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale and the Deliberative Thinking scale—males tended to outperform females."
There is also a possibility to indirectly measure sex differences in rationality by checking who believes irrational things, but "it is important to sample widely in beliefs without trying to select ones that men or women are more apt to believe". Kirkegaard draws attention to a 2014 study that does such a thing. This study instructed participants to select on a five-point scale how much they agreed or disagreed with a claim, and "scores were recoded such that a higher score reflected a greater rejection of the epistemically unwarranted belief". The unsupported beliefs were grouped into the categories "paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscience". In all of them, men scored higher than women, suggesting greater male rejection of unsupported beliefs in every category.
In other words, if one sex was more likely to distort reality in line with their biases, I would expect it to be women.
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