Help, I’m on the front line of knife crime

New research has shown women underestimate their intelligence and abilities, while men overestimate theirs. You name it, they think they’re great at it. In the lecture hall, behind the steering wheel, at the boardroom table.

It’s endearing to watch the pompous bluster if you’re their mother, affectionately exasperating if you’re the wife, and absolutely infuriating if you have no vested interest in their aggravatingly smug gene pool.

No surprise there, you might cry, possibly literally, into a hankie woven from your tattered hopes and dreams, thwarted by bullish colleagues and patronising bosses.

Not me. When I walk into a roomful of blokes in suits, I assume I’m cleverer. I just do. It makes things easier – and far less intimidating.

Is it true? I’ve got a reasonably robust IQ and I fancy my EQ (emotional quotient) is higher still, but that’s not the point: this isn’t a numbers game, ladies, it’s about mindset. The ultimate confidence trick, if you will.

Such towering self-belief is a corollary of age, of course, but also a reflection of growing up the youngest of five daughters. My father died when I was two and my fiercely bright mother instilled in us all a strong sense of our potential – along with the slightly less useful tenet that men are surplus to most requirements.

Women might feel it sounds the height of arrogance to think you’re better than everyone else, but it merely levels the gender playing field.

It’s what you do with your superpower that really matters. You could use your intelligence to score points, talk over everybody and make others feel inferior

Or, far more usefully, once liberated from the exhausting business of having to prove yourself time and again, you could simply listen to what others have to say, learn and adapt.

As Albert Einstein once said: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.”