Saturday, September 9 2006 11:39 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Houston: Women all over may not like it but it has been proved that men are smarter than women.

A study of 100,000 17- to 18-year-olds on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) published in the September 2006 issue of the journal Intelligence, has confirmed a surprising new finding-that men have a 4 to 5-point IQ advantage over women by adulthood.

Because girls mature faster than boys, the sex difference is masked during the school years, which explains why the sex difference was missed for 100 years.

The new study, based upon an analysis of SAT scores that correlates to IQ, appears to confirm the similar earlier research, using a different methodology, that concluded adult men have IQs 3.3 to 5 points higher than women.

It also found that the g factor--the general factor of mental ability underlay both the SAT Verbal (SAT-V) and the SAT Mathematics (SAT-M) scales with the congruence between these components greater than 0.90, and that it was the g factor that predicted student grades better than the traditionally used SAT-V and SAT-M scales.

The male and the female g factors were congruent in excess of .99, and they favoured males to an equivalent of 3.63 IQ points.

The male-female differences were present at every socioeconomic level, and across several ethnic groups.