Mental Health

Women Outscore Men in IQ Tests For the First Time

By Staff Reporter | Update Date: Jul 16, 2012 12:10 PM EDT

It's finally official - women are indeed smarter than men. According to new research, women are now outscoring men in the IQ department, a first since the test was invented 100 years ago.

According to researchers, since IQ testing began, women have trailed as much as five points behind, and psychologists conluded embedded genetic differences.

An authority on IQ tests, James Flynn said women have closed the gap and have now moved ahead.

"In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women's have risen faster,' Flynn said to the U.K.'s Daily Mail. "This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ."

According to Flynn, one possible explanation is that women's lives have become more demanding as they multitask between raising a family and doing a job. Another is that women have a slightly higher potential intelligence than men and are only now realizing it.

Flynn plans to publish his findings in a book and said more data was needed to explain the trend.

"The full effect of modernity on women is only just emerging," Flynn said.

Flynn evaluated IQ examination results from countries in Western Europe and from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina and Estonia and found that the gap in scores between men and women had become minimal in westernized countries.

The data for making exact comparisons was sparser and could be carried out for only a handful of countries.

In Australia, male and female IQs were found to be almost identical and women scored marginally more than men in New Zealand, Estonia and Argentina.

"As the world gets more complex, and living in it demands more abstract thought, so people are adapting," Flynn said. "I suspect that the same trends are happening in Britain, too, although the data is too sparse to be sure."

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