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For certain, many women smiled last night when news reports flashed the fact that women are now surpassing men in Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests, when they have lagged behind men’s — up to 5 points in the past.

James Flynn, author of the latest studies and founder of the “Flynn Effect” IQ analysis, which states that IQs are not static and rise as nations develop, said:

“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 and raising our IQ.” He adds that the “improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were disadvantaged in the past.”

ForbesWoman picks up the story asking if other factors are more important in a successful career than IQ, taking up the topic of motivation as studied by Angela Lee Duckworth at UPenn. Her team found a strong correlation between financial rewards for taking IQ tests and results. IQ results vacillated as much as 20 points, when the financial reward was greater than $10.

Rex Jung, PhD,, who studies the intersection of intelligence and creativity, says he’s not surprised that women’s IQs are surpassing men’s. “Women are entering the workforce in droves these days – in much greater numbers than ever before. If it’s true that IQ is associated with higher exposure to more cognitively engaging activities, like coursework and professional work, it makes total sense.” Read on at ForbesWoman

Related: Women, Math & Science Do Get Along Well, Mr. Summers AOC Spittin’ Sisters

Another survey of 1,286,350 people young people and adults confirms identically of an earlier analysis of about 500,000 sets of test scores. Girls are as good in math as boys. Period. The examination of 242 existing articles that assessed the math skills of 1,286,350 people, led by chief author Janet Hyde.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEONewly-appointed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told Fortune’s Patricia Sellers that Yahoo! executives “showed their evolved thinking” in hiring the 37-year-old, high-ranking Google executive to one of the top tech jobs in the industry — knowing that she was pregnant.

Mayer, who was Google’s 20th employee and first female engineer, is expecting a boy in early October. As Tech Crunch points out, female CEOs at public tech firms are very rare. A 30-something CEO is even rarer. A pregnant, 30-something, female tech CEO? Forgetta bout it!

Mayer, photographed above by Brigette Lacombe in her Google office, was Glamour magazine’s 2009 Woman of the Year.

Nurturing a Baby and a Start-Up

Last month, the NYTimes focused on the small group of women proving they can launch a high-growth technology company and be a mother at the same time.

Writing that the average age of a first-time founder of a company is 39, parenting or the decision to have children is an almost unavoidable conflict for would be female start-up visionaries.

Female entrepreneurs are less numerous and raise less money than their male counterparts. Women make up 10 percent of the founders at high-growth tech companies, “and they raise 70 percent less money than men do because of their lack of access to capital,” says Lesa Mitchell of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where she is vice president for initiatives on advancing innovation.