Gottfredson was born in San Francisco on June 24, 1947. She is a third generation university faculty member. Her father, Jack A. Howarth, was a faculty at U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, as was his father. Gottfredson initially majored in biology, but later transferred to psychology with her first husband, Gary Don Gottfredson. In 1969, she received a bachelor's degree in psychology from University of California, Berkeley. She worked in the Peace Corps in Malaysia. Gottfredson and her husband went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a Ph.D. in sociology in 1977.
Academic work
Gottfredson took a position at Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of Schools and investigated issues of occupational segregation and typology based on skill sets and intellectual capacity. She married Robert A. Gordon, who worked in a related area at Hopkins, and they divorced by the mid-90s. In 1985, Gottfredson participated in a conference called "The g Factor in Employment Testing". The papers presented were published in the December 1986 issue of the Journal of Vocational Behavior, which she edited. In 1986, Gottfredson was appointed Associate Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark. In 1989, The Washington Post reported that one of Gottfredson's presentations was cited favorably by an article in the National Association for the Advancement of White People's magazine. That year, she presented a series of papers on general intelligence factor and employment, including some criticizing the use of different curves for candidates of different races. Gottfredson has said:
We now have out there what I call the egalitarian fiction that all groups are equal in intelligence. We have social policy based on that fiction. For example, the 1991 Civil Rights Act codified Griggs vs. Duke Power, which said that if you have disproportionate hiring by race, you are prima facie -- that's prima facie evidence of racial discrimination....Differences in intelligence have real world effects, whether we think they're there or not, whether we want to wish them away or not. And we don't do anybody any good, certainly not the low-IQ people, by denying that those problems exist.
While an assistant professor of Educational Studies in the late 1980s, Gottfredson applied for and received three grants from the Pioneer Fund, which was created to advocate research into eugenics. She was promoted to full professor at the University of Delaware in 1990. That year, her fourth grant application to the Pioneer Fund was rejected by the board of the University, which said the funding would undermine their university's affirmative action. Gottfredson challenged the ruling with assistance from the Center for Individual Rights and the American Association of University Professors. In 1992, after two and a half years of debate and protest, the University administration reached a settlement that once again allowed Gottfredson and Jan Blits to continue receiving research funding from the Pioneer Fund. The arbitrator of the case held that the University's research committee had violated its own standards of review by looking at the content of Gottfredson's research and that Gottfredson had a right to academic freedom that public perceptions alone did not suffice to overcome. Gottfredson has defended the Pioneer Fund's president J. Philippe Rushton and disparaged his critics. Gottfredson has been very critical of psychologist Robert Sternberg's work on the triarchic theory of intelligence, arguing that Sternberg has not demonstrated a distinction between practical intelligence and the analytical intelligence measured by IQ tests. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "Gottfredson has worked tirelessly to oppose any and all efforts to reduce racial inequality in both in the workplace and in society as a whole."
