This will probably come as no surprise to women.

Women are doing better in college than men.

Well, they are the smarter set. I’ve know that since I struggled in elementary school and I watched Debbie Weinberg and Karen Kleid and the rest of their stupid friends offer the right answers without hesitation.

But there’s more to this than being the smarter set, women have a better work ethic than men. Witness how I wash a dinner dish and how my wife, Ann Louise, washes a dinner dish. Witness who made the dinner and who did the laundry.

I think the young ladies have learned a lot from their moms, and the boys from their dads. All of this came to mind when I happened to spot a list of the most read stories in The New York Times.

It was headlined, The New Gender Divide; At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust. What follows comes largely from Tamar Lewin’s wonderful and lengthy piece: Twenty-five years after women became the majority on college campuses, men trail in grades, academic recognition and completing college.

National studies report that college men study less and socialize more than their female classmates, a partial explanation for why women received a disproportionate share of the honors at Harvard, which was an all male school from 1636 until 1943, and did not grant Harvard diplomas to women until 1970.

By the way, Harvard’s incoming class in 2007 was 52 percent female. At Brown 40 percent of the applicants were male; this disparity has spurred some of the more select schools to lower their admission standards for men, and for women to charge that admission offices unfairly favor men.

Nationwide males make up 42 percent of the nation’s college students. “The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better,” said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.

Jen Smyers, started her senior year at American University in Washington last fall. She has a dean’s scholarship, has held three internships and three jobs since starting college. She’s made the dean’s list nearly every term. When her class graduates this month, she will finish her master’s degree.

Smyers shared with The New York Times why she is driven to excel in college. “Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about,” she said. “But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner. I’m rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman before I settle down.”

The men she says approach college without the same urgency. “The men don’t seem to hustle as much,” she said. “I think it’s a male entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they’ll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they’ll be fine.”

As tomorrow’s jobs require more skills and larger and more intricate content bases Mortenson suggests there will be difficulties for the men whose “educational attainment is not keeping up with the demands of the economy.”

“My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students,” said Wendy Moffat, an English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. “But the range among the guys is wider.”

“They have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus,” said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

“The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think that it must be a crisis for boys,” Sara Mead, author of a report for Education Sector, a Washington policy center, told The Times.

But she added, “boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?”

I believe that all the hard work that women are doing in school has to pay off for them. Poor-thinking, lazy-minded workers with little discipline will not help companies to turn the profits they’re under pressure to generate.

“The roles have changed a lot,” said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, where only 36 percent of the freshmen were male. “Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I don’t think guys willingness to work and succeed has changed, it’s more that women have stepped up.”

Whether women have stepped up or men have kicked back this new gender divide is bound to shift more power and benefits to women in the workplace – did you hear that boys?