r different-body size. Might this underpin the five-point difference in IQ between the sexes?

Of course, in normal daily life, there's not much real difference between a man with an IQ of 105 and a woman with an IQ of

100. The real difference only emerges as we rise up the IQ scale to the sort of level that the really top jobs require and as we drop lower down the scale - because men, as it turns out, have a much wider range of intelligence than women.

As a result, there are not only far more men with high IQs than there are women, but there are also, as I'm sure any woman would tell you, far more stupid men around than there are stupid women.

There is, as yet, no simple or, indeed, totally convincing explanation as to why this is, but while the abundance of stupid men has always caused social problems, it is the relative abundance of highly intelligent men that has caused problems for several generations of emancipated, liberated, ambitious women.

As a result, when these women get close to the top, they are simply out-numbered by highly intelligent and often ruthlessly ambitious men.

As our hunter-gatherer example has already suggested, men and women have also evolved different kinds of intelligence.

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The demands of hunting - devising tactics and strategies, anticipating likely outcomes - favoured the development of reasoning, together with mathematical and spatial abilities, which is why, thousands of years later, men continue to be overrepresented in fields such as maths and physics.

However, when it comes to verbal intelligence, women match men because, in our hunter-gatherer past, women needed verbal abilities to negotiate their relationships with both men and women and to teach and socialise their children.

This explains why they are every bit as successful as men at writing novels, say, or even newspaper columns. Their superior foreign language skills explain why if you walk into a university language lecture theatre, you won't find many men.

But there's another reason why, at the very highest and most demanding of levels in society, men have a natural advantage - and it's one we've seen in countless natural history TV documentaries.

Take, for example, the case of rutting stags or fighting chimps and you get the generally aggressive idea. Thanks to high levels of the male sex hormone testosterone, men are far more competitive and motivated for success than women.

For a man - at least as far as his hormone system is concerned - succeeding, competing and beating his rivals is very much still a matter of life and death.

Consequently, ambitious, high-achieving men typically work harder, compete more aggressively and become totally immersed in their careers, while even the most high-achieving women will often admit to finding themselves distracted by their genetically preconditioned aptitude for nurture and support.

For them, it is often a question of what to get for supper, or whether the children have got clean shirts for school. These are small distractions, admittedly, but at the very highest level they have an effect.

As an academic, it's my job to tell the truth, to explain the scientific evidence before us, irrespective of how unfashionable my conclusions are.

Big ideas such as Galileo's theory that Earth revolved around the Sun, rather than vice versa, or Darwin's theory of evolution, met with vociferous opposition when first advanced.

And, certainly, the ideas I've laid out here have already got some highly respected people into very serious trouble.

In 2005, the distinguished economist Lawrence Summers was forced to resign as President of Harvard University after expressing the view, at a seminar on diversity in the academic workplace, that in some fields the innate cognitive differences between the sexes might make the search for a perfect 50:50 gender balance impossible.

He didn't accept that the lack of women at senior level was all due to glass ceilings, anti-social hours or lack of opportunity and encouragement.

Instead, he went with what the science is clearly telling us - that at the really top level in maths and science, when we're not dealing with average intelligence but near genius, there are simply more men around who can do the job.

For that simple statement of truth, he was eventually forced out of his post.I take some comfort from the fact that Lawrence Summers' hormonally-driven male competitive instincts kicked in and he has now bounced back to become a senior economic adviser to President Obama.

But what if he and I are right - as I am 100 per cent convinced we are? If men are innately better at certain subjects than women, then why should society struggle so hard - and so expensively - to try to engineer a perfect balance betwee

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