It's official: men are smarter than women. Well, as official as a report produced by two blokes can be, that is.

The announcement was no doubt greeted with joy in taprooms the length and breadth of the country but it remains to be seen how many men were clever enough to keep their pub observations to themselves once they got home.

The report was put together by Dr Paul Irwing at the University of Manchester and Ulster University academic Richard Lynn on the study.

Dr Irwing was at least smart enough to say that he wasn't particularly pleased with the outcome and did-n't want to give fuel to the age old argument. I'm not sure what his domestic situation is but if he does have a partner of the opposite sex I'd lay good money that he was going home after that press conference with a bunch of roses and a box of Thornton's chocolates under his arm.

Co-author Richard Lynn, however, has previously expressed some rather controversial views, including saying that white people are cleverer than black people and that the middle classes are "generally supe-rior" to lower classes.

Aside from giving rise to countless living room rows (Him: "Men are cleverer than women."

Her: THWACK. Him: "Ouch!" Her: "You weren't clever enough to duck out of the way of that rolling pin, were you?") it does make me wonder just how useful this kind of report is.

A look at the GCSE and A-Level results of the past couple of weeks shows that girls generally perform bet-ter than boys in exams at that level.

although Mr Lynn has a theory about this: because most qualifications nowadays require a substantial amount of coursework, girls perform better because they are more conscientious than boys about getting tasks done. But it doesn't mean they are cleverer, according to Mr Lynn. Just more organised.

What I think is that men and women are as clever as each other, but just in different subjects.

For example, my wife knows more than me about Formula 1 racing, tennis, wine, gardening, just how clean a bathroom needs to be before you can actually say you've cleaned it, why having a bigger "out-goings" section than an "incomings" section on your bank statement is a bad thing, the habits of cats, shoes, crisps, Brad Pitt, ghosts, Coronation Street and welding.

I, on the other hand, have a vastly superior knowledge of comics, Rugby League, dogs, Ealing comedies, e-Bay, Japanese fiction, Wigan Athletic, early-to-mid-Nineties progressive techno music, bitter, why it's a good idea to press the brake pedal on my car twice when coming to a stop, and Emma Peel-era Avengers.

What we both seem to be at a complete loss about at the moment is how to encourage our two year old to stay in bad past 5.30am and why ghosts which have apparently been seen by all and sundry refuse to per-form for the TV cameras on Most Haunted.

So it's pretty finely balanced, but just to make sure I've just phoned my wife to ask her what exactly she thinks about all this men are smarter than women business.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a final answer to the whole question. My wife has just proved be-yond a shadow of a doubt that women are cleverer than men, because in response to the question she used a word that I didn't even understand.