As of 2019, which woman has the highest documented IQ in the world?

Marilyn vos Savant (born 1946) is an American magazine columnist, author, lecturer, and playwright. Her unbelievably high IQ level of 228 had Marilyn vos Savant listed in the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame for “Highest intelligence quotient (IQ) from 1986-1989, a competitive category the publication has since retired.

Savant lived a largely unremarkable childhood. She was born in 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri. She came from a humble family of coal miners, and her parents were immigrants from Germany and Italy. As a student she excelled at science and math. But when Savant turned 10, her life changed. Her intelligence was tested using two types of IQ tests (Stanford-Binet/Hoeflin’s Mega Test). The prodigy scored extremely high on both. She was also recognized as having the highest IQ score as a child.

Her parents decided to withhold the information from the public in order to avoid commercial exploitation and assure her a normal childhood. Savant's attempt at anonymity ended when 'The Guinness Book of World Records' obtained her IQ test scores from the 'Mega Society', a group whose membership is restricted to those with only the highest of the high IQ scores (top 99.999 %).

Most people's intelligence scores fall within a narrow range on either side of the "normal" score of 100; by contrast, Savant's IQ score of 228 is more than double that of a person with normal intellect and 88 points higher than the genius level.