The Woman With the Highest IQ: Who Holds the Record?

Ask who the smartest woman in the world is and one name comes up again and again: Marilyn vos Savant, the American columnist listed in the Guinness Book of World Records with a childhood IQ of about 228. For years she was, on paper, the record holder for the highest IQ of anyone, male or female. So if you want a single answer, the woman with the highest IQ is usually said to be Marilyn vos Savant.

Here is the honest part, and it matters as of 2026: that 228 is an old "ratio" score from a test she took at age 10, not a modern measured figure, and Guinness itself retired the whole category in 1990 because IQ tests were judged too unreliable to crown one person. Her adult scores were still exceptional but much lower. "Highest IQ woman" is really a media label stitched together from different tests, different eras, and different scoring systems that were never meant to be compared side by side.

Knowledge

2026.07.13

Famous People's IQ - And the Highest IQ Ever Recorded

Einstein's 160, Newton's 190, the mythical 228 - almost every famous IQ is an estimate, not a measured score. Here is what was really tested and what was guessed.

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Who is named as the highest-IQ woman?

The short answer: several women get called "the smartest," and no two of their numbers were produced the same way. The table below ranks the names most often cited, with the basis for each figure and whether it comes from a verified, modern, apples-to-apples test. Spoiler: none of them do.

Marilyn vos Savant and the ratio-score caveat

Marilyn vos Savant took the 1937 Stanford-Binet (Second Revision) as a child. At age 10 her measured "mental age" came out around 22 years and 10 months. Under the ratio method used then, IQ = (mental age / chronological age) x 100, so roughly 22.8 / 10 x 100 gives 228. Guinness listed that number, and for a time it made her, on paper, the highest-scoring person on record (Wikipedia).

The catch is what "ratio IQ" does to bright children. Dividing a high mental age by a small chronological age inflates the score enormously, and the number is not comparable to an adult's. Modern tests abandoned this and switched to the "deviation" method, where 100 is average and scores are spread around it. On that modern scale, 228 sits more than eight standard deviations above average, a level so far out that its odds run past one in trillions, which is effectively impossible for a real population. As an adult, vos Savant reportedly scored on Ronald Hoeflin's Mega Test, which translated to something closer to the 180s, still extraordinary but a long way from 228 (PsyPost).

Guinness recognized the mess and, in 1990, retired the "Highest IQ" category entirely, deciding the tests were too inconsistent to name one true record holder. That leaves vos Savant as the last name attached to the title, more by historical accident than by a clean measurement.

The other women who get cited

Edith Stern is frequently described with an IQ "over 200." Born in 1952, she was a child prodigy who earned advanced degrees young and went on to a serious engineering career with more than a hundred US patents to her name, including telephone innovations. The patents and degrees are real and documented; the "200+" figure is a popular-press label, not a published test result.

Ruth Lawrence (born 1971) is a British-Israeli mathematician whose story is genuinely staggering: she passed the Oxford mathematics entrance exam at 10, ranking first among 530 candidates, earned her degree at 13, and completed her doctorate by her late teens. She is now a mathematics professor. Profiles often attach an IQ around 175 to her, but that number is a secondhand estimate, not a test she is documented as having sat (Wikipedia). Her real record is the achievement, not a score.

Then there are the modern Mensa teens. Every so often a headline announces that a 11- or 12-year-old girl "beat Einstein and Hawking" by scoring 162 on a Mensa test. Lydia Sebastian, Tara Sharifi, Rajgauri Pawar, and others have all hit exactly 162 (ScienceAlert). That is not a coincidence: 162 is the maximum score on the Cattell III B paper for their age group, so it is a ceiling, not a peak. Many children score it. The "higher than Einstein" line is doubly shaky, because Einstein never took an IQ test at all; his "160" is itself an estimate.

The honest takeaway

Line the numbers up and the pattern is clear. The biggest figure (228) comes from the least comparable method. The mid-range estimates (200+, 175) have no documented test behind them. The only genuinely administered modern scores (162) are capped ceilings that many gifted kids reach. So "the highest-IQ woman" is not a settled fact with a leaderboard; it is a label the media reattaches whenever a new prodigy makes news.

That does not make these women any less remarkable. Vos Savant's decades of sharp problem-solving, Stern's patents, Lawrence's mathematics, and a 12-year-old maxing out a Mensa paper are all real. The single number on top of each story is the shaky part. A score is a snapshot of one test on one day, on one scale, and comparing a 1956 ratio score to a 2016 capped ceiling is comparing two things that were never the same measurement.

If you are curious where you land, the useful move is not to chase a headline number but to take one modern, deviation-scaled test and read your result against the 100-average scale honestly.

Q: Who has the highest IQ of any woman?

A: Marilyn vos Savant is the name most often given, from a Guinness-listed childhood score of about 228. But that is an obsolete ratio score, not a modern measured figure, and Guinness retired the category in 1990.

Q: Is Marilyn vos Savant's 228 IQ real?

A: It was a real test result, but not a comparable one. It came from the 1937 Stanford-Binet using the old ratio method, which inflates children's scores. On the modern deviation scale a 228 is effectively impossible, and her adult scores were much lower.

Q: What does a 162 Mensa score for a young girl mean?

A: It is the maximum score for that age band, not a unique peak. On the Cattell III B paper used by British Mensa, 162 is the ceiling for children, so several teens have reached it. It signals a gifted range, not a world record.

Q: Did these women score higher than Einstein?

A: The comparison does not hold. Einstein never took an IQ test; his "160" is an estimate. Headlines that say a girl "beat Einstein" are comparing a real score to a guessed one.