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Two-fifths of those who took part in the survey for New Woman magazine said they had enjoyed a relationship with a toyboy.

Just over three-quarters of those who had dated younger men said they were at least five years their junior, while for a fifth the age gap was at least a decade.

Diaz, 30, is currently seeing Justin Timberlake, 22 and Moore, 40, is dating actor Ashton Kutcher who at 25 is 15 years younger than her.

The survey found being with younger men makes women more body conscious - with 70% admitting to having extra concerns about their looks.

"Women are living increasingly busy lives and it can be difficult to find the perfect man," said New Woman editor Sarah Cremer.

"We are also looking for more fun and energy out of our relationships. Gone are the days where we look for men to take care of us.

If you want to feel confident about Canada's future, meet five remarkable kids. They're the top graduates this year at the elite Toronto French School, and they are the crème de la crème de la crème of their generation. They are accomplished, idealistic, funny, modest, well-rounded, socially aware, and ferociously bright. And all of them are girls.

It's not that the school doesn't have its share of high-achieving boys. It does. But at TFS, girls dominate academics out of all proportion to their numbers. Nine of this year's top 10 graduates are girls. Eight of the nine students in the Scholars' Guild (which is made up of the top students from last year) are girls. The girls have also grabbed the lion's share of the external awards, including one of the University of Toronto's much-coveted National Scholarships (Ms. Sharpe won, but hasn't decided if she'll go there because she has competing offers.) The student council president is male -- this year.

Everyone knows that girls are doing well in school these days. What's stunning is how well. The girls have moved so far ahead, the boys can barely see their dust. This is something new in history -- an entire generation of alpha females, many of whom are destined to outearn the men as well as outperform them.

"Income is closely associated with educational status," says Paul Cappon, director-general of the Council of Ministers of Education Canada. "We've known about this tendency for a long time, but it's much more dramatic now."

It's not just on the soft side that the girls excel. Ms. Li, 18, is one of the school's top three students in math. (The other two are boys.) "I hate to say I'm a math nerd, but I am," she says with a laugh. Ms. Milkereit, 18, wants to specialize in biological and life sciences. (She also speaks French, German, and Spanish.) Ms. Tremblay, 17, is also interested in science. Ms. Zener, 17, plans to do a five-year combined course in biomedical science and business administration. "I've always wanted to be a doctor and an astronaut," she says.

Speaking of doctors, women are now dominant in medical school. Only five years ago, they made up 49 per cent of first-year students. Today they make up 59 per cent. At Hamilton's McMaster University, 69 per cent are women, and women make up more than two-thirds of incoming students in Quebec.

Heather Munroe-Blum, the principal of McGill University in Montreal, recalls that as recently as 20 years ago, women were being discouraged from going to professional schools because they might take places away from men. "But women have strong aptitudes in these areas, surprise, surprise! If you look just at academic performance, girls excel -- especially in medicine and law," she says.

At McGill's medical school, men still outnumber women slightly. But women dominate in law school (by 3 to 2) and even management. In the sciences, it's also 3 to 2 in favour of the women. "It has literally been a complete reversal in 25 years," says Ms. Munroe-Blum.

These stunning numbers simply reflect McGill's demographics. Like campuses across the country, it's a dating paradise for boys. McGill has three female undergraduates for every two males, and it is typical.

These trends hold true throughout North America, in every ethnic and income group. In the United States, many Ivy League and other elite schools have abandoned gender-blindness in admissions so that they can keep their ratios close to 50-50. The only remaining bastions of male supremacy are engineering, and the hardest of the hard sciences, such as physics. In Canada, if you want to find a majority of men you'll have to go to Waterloo, where computers and engineering rule.

Some people argue that all the effort devoted to fixing the gender gap that used to exist for girls has come at the expense of boys. The school culture has become so feminized, they say, that boys are
set up for failure.

It's hard to say whether the boys are actually doing worse, or whether the girls are simply doing so much better. What's clear is that from the earliest age, the boys are lagging, and the longer they're in school the worse it gets.

This week, Dr. Cappon's group released the latest results of its authoritative national writing test for 13- and 16-year-olds. To pass, a student had to attain a level of writing where "errors do not interfere with communication." Among 16-year-olds, 69 per cent of the girls made the grade, but only 53 per cent of the boys. Yet three-quarters of the students who wrote the test said they wanted to go to college or university.

"Boys are not going to get into university, or complete post secondary education, with that level of writing ability," says Dr. Cappon. The facts bear him out. Boys are 30 per cent more likely to drop out of high school.

No wonder the hottest topic in education is how to help the boys. The remedies suggested range from more boy-friendly books (Surprise! Boys are interested in cowboys and cars) to more recess (Surprise! Boys have a hard time sitting still) and more male role models (Guess what! Boys admire hockey stars).

To the average parent, this may seem like a stunning statement of the obvious. But in education, it's an earthquake. An entire generation of educational theory has been rooted in the notion that boys and girls are the same, and that gender is socially constructed. Worse, social critics such as Christine Hoff Summers (The War Against Boys) have argued persuasively that schools tend to pathologize normal boy behaviour -- in other words, to treat boys as defective girls.

Today, it's nature, not nurture, that rules the education conferences. The hottest experts are showing up with brain scans to prove their point that gender makes a difference after all. The keynote speaker at a conference of independent schools in Toronto this summer is Dr. Leonard Sax, an outspoken crusader for single-sex education. He believes the best way to help the boys will also help the girls: Segregate them and tailor their education to their very different brains. "These differences are real," he argues. "They are grounded in biology."

Maybe the boys will catch up. Meantime, on our doorstep is a social revolution. The graduating girls of '03 are confident, goal-oriented and self-sufficient. They're used to paying their own way, and don't expect to depend on men for much of anything. Who will they marry? How will they bring up their kids?

"What does it mean when women are the main breadwinners and the main nurturers?" wonders Dr. Cappon. "We've never had a situation like this before."

Back at TFS, the girls don't look too worried. Their summer is chock-full of plans for language courses, volunteer work at the hospital for disabled kids, an Internet project for War Child Canada, and learning more about research into Alzheimer's. Ms. Sharpe wants to polish her American Sign Language, which she picked up a couple of years ago for fun.

The darlings have been fretting for some years now that they may be rendered unnecessary if women get financial and biological independence, learning how to reproduce and refinance without them.

What if nature played a cruel trick and demoted men, so they had to be judged merely by their appearance, pliability and talent for gazing raptly at the opposite sex, no matter how bored?

New research on the Y chromosome shows that my jittery male friends are not paranoid; they are in an evolutionary shame spiral.

As Nicholas Wade wrote in The New York Times: "Although most men are unaware of the peril, the Y chromosome has been shedding genes furiously over the course of evolutionary time, and it is now a fraction of the size of its partner, the X chromosome. The decay of the Y stems from the fact that it is forbidden to enjoy the principal advantage of sex, which is, of course, for each member of a pair of chromosomes to swap matching pieces of DNA with its partner."

Wade said that biologists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had made a remarkable discovery: "Denied the benefits of recombining with the X, the Y recombines with itself."

The ultimate guys' night out. Simply put, the Y chromosome figured out a way to save itself from extinction by making a difficult hairpin turn and swapping molecular material with itself.

Self-love as a survival mechanism: the unflinching narcissism of men may send women into despair at times, but it has saved their sex for the next 5 million or 10 million years.

But, according to Olivia Judson, science's answer to the sensual British cook Nigella Lawson, men may need more than narcissism to survive.

Judson, a 33-year-old evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London who has written a book about animals in a Dear Abby style, or Deer Abby, under the pen name Dr. Tatiana, says the worm has turned. "For a long time, it was assumed that promiscuity was good for males and bad for females in terms of the number of kids they could have," she explains. "But it wasn't until 1988 that it really started to become evident that females were benefiting from having sex with lots of males, with more promiscuous females having more and healthier offspring."

In her book, Judson writes about powerful babes, noting that females in more than 80 species, like praying mantises, have been caught devouring their lovers before, during or after mating.

And then there's the tiny female midge, who plunges her proboscis into the male midge's head during procreation. As Judson told the journalist Ken Ringle, "Her spittle turns his innards to soup, which she slurps up, drinking until she's sucked him dry."

The Economist recently reported on a variation on the creepy-crawly girl-eats-boy love stories. The male orb-weaving spider kills himself before the female has a chance to.

Biologists now believe that the male orb-weaver dies when he turns himself into a plug to prevent other males from copulating, thus ensuring his genes are more likely to live on. In a new book called "Y: The Descent of Men," Steve Jones, a professor of genetics at University College in London, says males, always a genetic "parasite," have devolved to become the "second sex."

The news that Dolly the sheep had been cloned without masculine aid sent a frisson through the Y populace, he writes, because men began to fear that science would cause nature to return to its original, feminine state and men would fade from view. The Y chromosome, "a mere remnant of its once mighty structure," is worried about size.

"Men are wilting away," Jones writes. "From sperm count to social status and from fertilization to death, as civilization advances, those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline."

Perhaps that's why men are adapting, becoming more passive and turning into "metrosexuals," the new term for straight men who are feminized, with a taste for facials and home design.

Studying people who live 100 years and more leads Harvard researchers to conclude that menopause is a major determinant of the life spans of both women and men.

Women's life span depends on the balance of two forces, according to Thomas Perls, a geriatrician at Harvard Medical School. One is the evolutionary drive to pass on her genes, the other is the need to stay healthy enough to rear as many children as possible. "Menopause draws the line between the two," Perls says. It protects older women from the risks of bearing children late in life, and lets them live long enough to take care of their children and grandchildren.

As for men, Perls believes "their purpose is simply to carry genes that ensure longevity and pass them on to their daughters. Thus, female longevity becomes the force that determines the natural life span of both men and women."

"Most animals do not undergo menopause," adds Ruth Fretts, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "It seems that menopause evolved in part as a response to the amount of time that the young remain dependent on adults to ensure their survival."

Pilot whales, for example, suckle their young until age 14, and they, along with humans, are two of the few species that menstruate.

Human females eventually become so frail that bearing children involves a high risk of death. Earlier in evolution, that was as young as 35 to 40 years old. "Anyone who developed a genetic alteration that caused infertility, i.e., menopause, obtained a survival advantage over females who continued to be fertile and died bearing children," Perls says.

This reasoning, however, does not explain why women live so much longer than men. "In all developed countries and most undeveloped ones, women outlive men, sometimes by a margin of 10 years," Perls and Fretts note. "In the U.S., average life expectancy at birth is about 79 years for women and about 72 years for men."

The gender gap is most pronounced in those who live 100 years or more. Among centenarians worldwide, women outnumber males nine to one. Perls and Fretts are studying all centenarians from eight cities and towns around Boston, 100 people in all. Eighty-five are women.

The mortality gap varies during other stages of life. Between ages 15 and 24 years, men are four to five times more likely to die than women. This time frame coincides with the onset of puberty and an increase in reckless and violent behavior in males. Researchers refer to it as a "testosterone storm." Most deaths in this male group come from motor vehicle accidents, followed by homicide, suicide, cancer, and drownings.

After age 24, the difference between male and female mortality narrows until late middle age. In the 55- to 64-year-old range, more men than women die, due mainly to heart disease, suicide, car accidents, and illnesses related to smoking and alcohol use. Heart disease kills five of every 1,000 men in this age group.

"It seems likely that women have been outliving men for centuries and perhaps longer," say Perls and Fretts. Even with the sizable risk conferred by childbirth, women have outsurvived men at least since the 1500s. Although, in the United States between 1900 and the 1930s, the death risk for women of childbearing age was as high as that for men. Since then, improved health care, particularly in childbirth, has put women ahead of men again in the survival struggle, as well as raising life expectancy for both sexes.

A longer life doesn't necessarily mean a healthier life, however. While men succumb to fatal illnesses like heart disease, stroke, and cancer, women live on with non-fatal conditions such as arthritis, osteoporosis, and diabetes. "While men die from their diseases, women live with them," Perls comments.

One contributor to the gender difference in life span is the influence of sex hormones. The male hormone testosterone not only increases aggressive and competitive behavior in young men, it increases levels of harmful cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein), raising a male's chances of getting heart disease or stroke.

On the other hand, the female hormone estrogen lowers harmful cholesterol and raises "good" cholesterol (high-density lipoprotein). Emerging evidence suggests estrogen treatment after menopause reduces the risk of dying from heart disease and stroke, as well as of dying in general.

Perls and Fretts believe that longer life means survival of the fittest, and women, evolutionarily speaking, are more fit than men. The longer a woman lives and the more slowly she ages, the more offspring she can produce and rear to adulthood. Therefore, evolution would naturally select the genes of such women over those who die young.

Long-lived men would also have an evolutionary advantage over their shorter-lived brethren. However, says Perls, "studies of chimps, gorillas, and other species closely related to humans suggest that a male's reproductive capacity is actually limited more by access to females than by life span. And because men have not been involved in child care as much as females, survival of a man's offspring, and thus his genes, depended not so much on how long he lived, but on how long the mother of his children lived."

In their studies of centenarians, Perls and Fretts found that a surprising number of women who lived to be 100 or more gave birth in their forties. These 100-year-old women were four times as likely to have given birth in their forties as women born in the same year who died at age 73. A study of centenarians in Europe by the Max Planck Institute of Demography in Germany found the same relationship between longevity and fecundity.

This does not mean that having a child in middle age makes a woman live longer. Rather, Perls says, "the factors that allow certain older women to bear children -- a slow rate of aging and decreased susceptibility to disease -- also improve a woman's chances of living a long time. Extending that idea, we argue that the driving force of human life span is maximizing the time during which woman can bear children. The age at which menopause eliminates the threat of female survival by ending further reproduction may therefore be the determinant of subsequent life span."

If this is true, then the genes of female centenarians hold the secrets of a longer, healthier life. And these are no ordinary genes. Whether the average person drinks, smokes, exercises, or eats her vegetables adds or subtracts five to ten years to or from her life. But to live an additional 30 years requires the kind of genes that slow down aging and reduce susceptibility to conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, stroke, heart disease, and cancer.

Clues about what those genes are and how they work could come from studying those who survive 100 years or more, Perls believes. The New England Centenarian Study he runs is the only scientific investigation of the oldest oldsters being done in the United States. He has now expanded it to include all centenarians in the city of Boston, about 100 more people.

"We think that centenarians are a tremendous resource for the discovery of genes responsible for aging and the ways in which aging occurs," says Perls. "Finding these genes could lead to testing people and determining who might be disposed to accelerated aging via diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, and stroke. Such individuals might eventually be treated to extend the prospect of their living longer."

The oldest person for which reliable records exist was a woman who recently died in France at the age of 123. "Reaching such an age is like winning the lottery," Perls comments. "The odds are about one in 6 billion. From a practical point of view, we can consider 100 years as the average maximum of human life. We're not there yet, of course. At present, average life expectancy for those born after 1960 is about 85 years."

Although women can expect to live longer than men, the gap is closing. Death rates have begun to converge in the past 20 years. Some researchers attribute the convergence to women taking on the behaviors and stresses formerly considered the domain of males -- smoking, drinking, and working outside the home.

For example, Perls and Fretts point out that deaths from lung cancer have almost tripled in women in the past 20 years. One study concluded that, on average, middle-aged female smokers live no longer than male smokers.

A study of 599 men and women aged 85 found that the women were mentally quicker and sharper than the men. In word and number recognition tests, a third of the women notched up consistently speedy responses, compared to 28 per cent of the male subjects. Women also beat men in memory
tests.

The results of the Leiden University study, conducted in the Dutch town, are published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Participants included married couples, widows, widowers and the unmarried.

The team allowed for the problems of dementia by conducting separate tests on those considered to be fully mentally active. The results were all the more surprising because 70 per cent of female subjects had a poor education, while more than half of the men had been well educated.

This led the research team to suggest that biological, rather than social, differences between the sexes accounted for the results. Women's brains carry on performing for longer because they live longer than men and need to be mentally alert into old age, the researchers concluded.

All these years, the world was dominated by men, and this is probably why the idea was propounded that women, as a rule, were inclined to gossip. That women, as a rule, were vain, and more concerned with personal beauty, cosmetics and what have you. It was men who put out those ideas.

The late Harry Belafonte used to sing a Calypso, the title of which I have appropriated for this discourse on the subject of men, vis-a-vis women. There was also another calypso, sung, I believe by the Kingston Trio, which said that "Woman sweeter than man, woman sweeter than man. But if a woman sweeter than me, then I jump in the Mahaweli". And there have been other songs, too, many of them Calypsos, on the same theme.

In my youth, I thought these singers had got it all wrong, but now, in the twilight of my life, I am inclined to the view that they were right all along.

Let me give that sucker-punch, straight from the shoulder, as they would say in boxing parlance. Men, I have found, particularly today, are bigger gossips than women. Men are also more vain than women.

Today, as everyone knows, it is a woman's world. We have a woman president . We have women at the helm in every walk of life. We have a ministry of women's affairs though we never did have a ministry of men's affairs, because that would have been too staggering a ministry for anyone to handle.

What prompted me to set off on this discourse was a magazine, brought to my place of work by a colleague, a woman, who deals with women's fashions and whatnot A glance through this mag. made me realise that what I had been thinking all along was true men are more vain in matters of personal beauty and sartorial elegance than women.

I have watched men, both in my place of work and elsewhere, and over the years studied their body language as much as I would study any other language, and let me admit that I have a penchant for studying languages, having a smattering of more than fifteen of the major languages spoken throughout the world.

How often have I seen men passing a mirror. It used to be said that a woman could not pass a mirror without stopping to admire herself in it. It can now be said of men, more than of women.

Take my place of work. I have watched young men, many of whom cannot be called handsome by any stretch of imagination, visiting the 'toilet' very often, not to empty their bladders but to stand before the
mirror there and admire themselves, pushing a stray hair back into place, and doing all those things that I thought were done only by women.

And as for gossip ! I have been a newspaperman for more than fifty years, and during that time I have found that the biggest gossips meaning talking shop about other people and their idiosyncracies in the newspaper world, at least in this country, are the men.

I can understand men in groups discussing the weather, the political situation, and high cost of living and loving and so on. But what do you call men who gather in groups of three or four and begin tearing apart someone who invariably is not present among them

I have gathered more information about someone I was writing about, by simply listening to groups of men chatting, whether with glass in hand or not. I have learned about who was doing what, and to whom, not by reading the newspapers, but by listening to newspapermen. Women in the fourth estate, I find rarely gossip, and if they do so, it is for the purpose of gathering material for something they are in the process of writing.

There was this colleague of mine who was a champion gossip, and if ever there was a prize given to men for gossipping, he would have romped home an easy winner. In the nearly thirty years I have known him, I have never heard him speak well of anyone not even of the dead. But just mention the name of someone, and he will tell you all the wrongs, all the faults, and everything else about that man, escept something good.

No wonder then that this is fast becoming a woman's world. I do not think I will live long enough to see the day when women outnumber their male counterparts in every sphere of activity. But that day will come, I can assure you, because, as Harry Belafonte sang, "Man smart. Woman smarter!"