July 15: Women appear to have won a decisive victory in the battle of the sexes. Psychologists have found female IQ scores have risen above men’s for the first time.

Since IQ testing began a century ago, women have been as much as five points behind, leading psychologists to suggest embedded genetic differences.

That gap has been narrowing in recent years and this year women have moved ahead.

The finding has been made by James Flynn, a world-renowned authority on IQ tests. “In the last 100 years, the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster,” said Flynn. “This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt, raising our IQ.”

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 realising it.

Flynn, who will publish his findings in a new book, said more data were needed to explain the trend. “The full effect of modernity on women is only just emerging,” he said.

The history of IQ testing is controversial because it has consistently shown differences between genders and races. The key advance was the 1980s discovery of the “Flynn Effect” which showed that scores in western countries increased by roughly three points a decade.

It means modern Caucasian westerners score about 30 points more than people living 100 years ago. It also showed IQ was not genetic and could be improved.

Flynn tested that idea by collating new IQ tests from countries in western Europe and from the US, Canada, New Zealand, Argentina and Estonia.

These showed that in westernised countries the gap between men and women had become trivial.

The data for making exact comparisons were sparser and could be carried out for only a handful of countries. It included Australia, where male and female IQs were found to be almost identical. In New Zealand, Estonia and Argentina, women scored marginally more than men.

“What we are seeing here is the impact of modernity,” said Flynn. “As the world gets more complex, and living in it demands more abstract thought, so people are adapting….

“The brains of modern people are growing differently and showing increased cognitive complexity which we measure as increases in IQ. This improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were more disadvantaged in the past.”