In July 2012, several media outlets reported Flynn as saying that women had, for the first time in a century, surpassed men on IQ tests based on a study he conducted in 2010. However, Flynn announced that the media had seriously distorted his results and went beyond his findings, revealing that he had instead discovered that the differences between men and women on one particular test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, had become minimal in five modernised nations (whereas before 1982 women had scored significantly lower). Women, he argued, caught up with men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. Therefore, he said, when a total account of the Flynn effect is considered, women's closing the gap had moved them up in IQ slightly faster than men as a result. Flynn had previously documented this same trend among ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups. According to Flynn, the sexes are "dead equal on cognitive factors ... in their ability to deal with using logic on the abstract problems of Raven's", but that temperamental differences in the way boys and girls take the tests likely account for the tiny variations in mean scores, rather than any difference in intellectual ability.