London, March 30: The flutter of eyelashes, the smile across the dance floor and the giggle after a lame joke — every woman knows the time-honoured ways to get a man.

But research suggests that the flirty female is wasting her time. Men, it seems, are blind to the subtle seduction techniques of the opposite sex.

Short of pouncing on the object of her lust, a woman’s non-verbal signals of sexual interest often prove sadly lost on the young male brain, according to a study to be published next month in Psychological Science.

Researchers at Indiana University used nearly 300 undergraduates of both sexes to test students’ abilities to spot a come-on. The students were asked to view images of women and categorise them as friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting.

Each undergraduate reported on 280 photographs, which had been sorted into the four categories based on surveys by different groups of students.

Male students scored worse for accuracy than females — and they were particularly confused by amiability and amorousness. The men commonly mistook women's sexual signals as merely friendly and were prone to see friendliness as a blatant advance.

According to the researchers, rather than going through life thinking “she wants me”, men often find themselves trying to navigate a foreign world of social signals without a phrasebook.

Kathy Lette, a best-selling author, said the research was further evidence of women’s superiority. “Women are fluent in body language, men just have the gift of the ‘grab’.

“It is really confusing for women. The average bloke either doesn’t realise that we fancy them until we are giving birth to their children in the labour ward; or he presumes all women fancy him all the time. God was playing some kind of prank when he developed two sexes.”

But the research does not mean that women might as well ditch the lipstick. Not all flirting gets lost in translation.

Coreen Ferris, the lead researcher, said: “These are average differences. Some men are very skilled in reading clues.”