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While the gender fight to determine who is stronger and smarter has been an unresolved issue, a recent study on IQ goes in favor of women.

According to a study conducted by James Flynn, considered one of the foremost experts on intelligence testing, women are smarter than men, at least according to standard IQ test.

Flynn has been researching IQ level data of past 100 years and he says that many a people in developed countries are getting smarter over the years, about three points more than average. This is a significant improvement in itself, he wrote in the study.

He further says that when IQ test batteries were first launched, women used to score much lesser than men, and mostly their scores used to be as less as five points lesser than men.

But then women have grown much smarter than men compared to those days and perhaps have grown intellectually faster than men, with their scores at par with men these days.

Flynn's findings are based on the Raven's Progressive Matrices IQ test and involves participants ranging from age ten to thirty, though his recent research participants are between fifteen and eighteen years old. A person's intelligence is presumed fully developed around this age is also the time before the intelligence is affected or degraded by environmental factors.

For the current study, Flynn tested 500 males and 500 females from a wide variety of so-called advanced countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina and found women scored a half to a whole point higher in all of them, the news release stated.

The only country where men scored a couple of points more than women was Israel.

Although Flynn could not give a specific explanation for why women are growing smarter than men, he said that perhaps it is the roles that women now play in the society. It could be the multi-tasking. Taking care of children, work and increased responsibilities may have perhaps made their brains adjust to the need and smarter.