Doing a quick google search on gender and intelligence everything I found basically said that, on average, gender makes no significant difference to intelligence - even if the study wasn’t specifically looking at gender. A couple of quick links:
http://clearinghouse.mwsc.edu/manuscripts/335.asp (see results section)
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DyeHard/dye990602.html (First two paragraphs)
As for the difference in nobel prizes and new inventions, I think that ** Jack Batty** hit the nail on the head. Until recently women have not had the same educational advantages as men, in some places in the world, they still don’t. The same goes for employment - in many engineering fields, women are still under represented. I am a software engineer, and I remember being told at university (sorry, no cite) that in Australia female software engineers account for only 3% of all software engineers. How can you expect that 3% to produce 50% of the new innovations? Now the proportion is increasing slowly - in my year about 10% of SE graduates were female. There are reasons why women don’t get into technical and scientific fields, and that’s another debate, but it has nothing to do with ability.
I would also suggest you look at other female dominated professions, for example teaching. Now teachers for the most part don’t invent new things and don’t win nobel prizes. That’s not their job. But they do an excellent job of shaping young minds, and maybe some of them will win those prizes or cure cancer. Are we to say that a techer is less significant than the scientist they help produce? Without the teacher, the future scientist will not learn the things that he or she requires as a foundation to the new invention.
I guess what I’m saying is that there are some professions that invent things - and these are the professions that tend also to recieve awards such as nobel prizes. At this time in most of these professions (engineering, science, mathematics etc) women are not represented in equal numbers to men. It then follows that the inventions coming out of these professions, will more likely than not be invented by a man (if there are only 10% women - you would expect 10% of such discoveries to be by women - any more and your argument really falls flat). There are many other professions (most I would argue) that for the most part don’t invent and discover new things. (Teaching, police, politics, emergency services, healthcare, HR, construction, finance, insurance and many more) Both men and women work in these fields and are highly competent. Their contribution to society is no less because they use existing technology rather than create it. To measure the value of a person, gender or profession by the number of nobel prizes, patents or new inventions is to demean millions of highly skilled, highly professional individuals without whose contribution life as we know it would be vastly different. The basis of your argument is fundamentally flawed.