Читать книгу Feminism: The Ugly Truth - Mike J.D. Buchanan - Страница 17

‘Mrs Merton’ to Debbie McGee: ‘But what first, Debbie, attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels?’

Caroline Aherne 1963- English comedienne, writer and actress: The Mrs Merton Show (1994-8)

The first part of this chapter is drawn from The Glass Ceiling Delusion (2011) and it mainly covers the issues of why men and women tend to have different natures, and how those differences manifest themselves in relation to the world of work. In my critique of marriage in the developed world in the modern era The Marriage Delusion: the fraud of the rings? (2008) – later published as a paperback with the title The Fraud of the Rings – I covered the question of the different natures of men and women in the context of marriage, and why they are so often a problem in the modern era.

There are men among us with faces which (let’s be kind) only a mother could love. Some of these men happen to be rich, famous or powerful: ‘alpha males’. They commonly share an attribute, having (or having once had) remarkably beautiful partners. One thinks of the musical theatre composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber (Sarah Brightman), the magician Paul Daniels (Debbie McGee), the entrepreneur Bernie Ecclestone (Slavica Radić, a former fashion model 11.5 inches taller and 28 years younger than lucky Bernie), the tennis player Andy Murray (Kim Sears) and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy (Carla Bruni).

Notably beautiful women do not, it would appear, fall in love with poor unattractive men. Perhaps they’re not as beautiful as we think. I would look pretty stood next to some of these men. We shall return to the important phenomenon of female attractiveness later in the chapter.

Why should we have an interest in gender-typical traits? Why can we not treat everyone as individuals, thereby avoiding the cardinal sin of stereotyping? The reason is that women campaign collectively – and effectively – for women’s interests at the expense of men’s interests, while men rarely campaign for men’s interests, effectively or otherwise. The ‘shortage’ of female engineers is seen to be a problem requiring to be addressed, while the ‘shortage’ of male nurses isn’t. The inevitable result? A considerable amount of taxpayers’ money has been spent trying to encourage young women into engineering (and other ‘male typical’ fields) but with minimal impact: even today, over 90% of engineering graduates are men.

For the avoidance of doubt, when I refer to men and women from this point onwards I shall mean gender-typical men and women – by definition, the majority – unless I make it clear I mean otherwise. I don’t consider either gender innately superior to the other, but I think it’s clear that the genders are in general different in their habits of thinking and acting. I’m now 54, and the different natures of men and women have been clear to me from an early age. ‘Nature’ being a word whose meaning may be ambiguous, let me state clearly what I mean by it in the context of this book. In general, I believe, men and women differ with respect to:

-their relative interests in interpersonal relationships, in particular those with family members, friends and work colleagues

-their relative interests in work, politics and business

-their attitudes towards risk

-their attitudes towards ‘work/life balance’: the types of work they seek, the hours they devote to work, and their drives to be promoted

-their styles of operating in the world of work: men being more naturally competitive, women being more naturally co-operative

If these differences are real, it follows that they will impact on men’s and women’s life choices and therefore their average incomes. The most commonly cited measure of the ‘gender pay gap’ relates to the incomes of male and female full-time workers regardless of the equivalence of their lines of work. The gap, while it exists, is not the result of discrimination against women. It’s attributable to the choices men and women freely make in their personal and working lives, including the greater readiness of women to take career breaks to look after babies, young children and ageing relatives. If and when women in significant numbers make different choices, the pay gap will disappear.

If we accept for the moment that, in general, men’s and women’s natures are different, what might be the source of those difference? Could it be something as obvious as men’s and women’s brains being different? For answers to this question we turn first to a book written by an American professor of the female persuasion, Louann Brizendine, on the time-honoured ‘ladies first’ principle. From Wikipedia:

‘Louann Brizendine is a neuropsychiatrist and the author of The Female Brain, published in 2006. Her research concerns women’s moods and hormones. She graduated in neurobiology from UC Berkeley, attended Yale School of Medicine and completed a residency in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology and is an endowed clinical professor. She joined the faculty of UCSF Medical Center at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute in 1988 and now holds the Lynne and Marc Benioff-endowed chair of psychiatry. At UCSF, Brizendine pursues active clinical, teaching, writing and research activities.

In 1994 she founded the UCSF Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, and continues to serve as its director. The Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic is a psychiatric clinic designed to assess and treat women of all ages experiencing disruption of mood, energy, anxiety, sexual function and well-being due to hormonal influences on the brain. Brizendine also treats couples in the clinic.

Additionally, Brizendine teaches courses to medical students, residents and other physicians throughout the country, addressing the neurobiology of hormones, mood disorders, anxiety problems, and sexual interest changes due to hormones.’

Professor Brizendine is clearly far more qualified than I to make statements about the female brain and to compare it with the male brain. What startled me when I read The Female Brain was the sheer extent of the differences between the two brains: men and women truly do inhabit different mental worlds. Brizendine outlines how a range of hormones affect women’s brains as they progress through life stages: foetal, girlhood, puberty, sexual maturity/single woman, pregnancy, breast feeding, childrearing, perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause. She reveals in the book that during her medical education at Berkeley, Yale and Harvard, she ‘learned little or nothing about female biological or neurological difference outside of pregnancy’, and continues:

‘The little research that was available, however, suggested that the brain differences, though subtle, were profound. As a resident in psychiatry, I became fascinated by the fact that there was a two-to-one ratio of depression in women compared with men. No one was offering any clear reasons for this discrepancy. Because I had gone to college at the peak of the feminist movement, my personal explanations ran toward the political and the psychological. I took the typical 1970s stance that the patriarchy of Western culture must have been the culprit. It must have kept women down and made them less functional than men. But that explanation alone didn’t seem to fit: new studies were uncovering the same depression ratio worldwide. I started to think that something bigger, more basic and biological, was going on.

One day it struck me that male versus female depression rates didn’t start to diverge until females turned 12 or 13 – the age girls began menstruating. It appeared that the chemical changes at puberty did something in the brain to trigger more depression in women…

When I started taking a woman’s hormonal state into account as I evaluated her psychiatrically, I discovered the massive neurological effects her hormones have during different stages in life in shaping her desires, her values, and the very way she perceives reality [Author’s italics]…

Of the fluctuations that begin as early as three months old and last until after menopause, a woman’s neurological reality is not as constant as a man’s. His is like a mountain that is worn away imperceptibly over the millennia by glaciers, weather, and the deep tectonic movements of the earth. Hers is more like the weather itself – constantly changing and hard to predict.’

From the chapter, ‘The Birth of the Female Brain’:

‘Common sense tells us that boys and girls behave differently. We see it every day at home, on the playground, and in classrooms. But what the culture hasn’t told us is that the brain dictates these divergent behaviors. The impulses of children are so innate that they kick in even if we adults try to nudge them in another direction. One of my patients gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter many unisex toys including a bright red fire truck instead of a doll. She walked into her daughter’s room one afternoon to find her cuddling the truck in a baby blanket, rocking it back and forth, saying, ‘Don’t worry, little truckie, everything will be all right.’

This isn’t socialization. The little girl didn’t cuddle her ‘truckie’ because her environment molded her unisex brain. There is no unisex brain. She was born with a female brain, which came complete with its own impulses. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they’re born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values, and their very reality.’

From a later chapter, ‘The Future of the Female Brain’:

‘Almost every woman I have seen in my office, when asked what would be her top three wishes if her fairy godmother could wave her magic wand and grant them, says, ‘Joy in my life, a fulfilling relationship, and less stress with more personal time.’

Our modern life – the double shift of career and primary responsibility for the household and family – has made these goals particularly difficult to achieve. We are stressed out by this arrangement, and our leading cause of anxiety and depression is stress. One of the great mysteries of our lives is why we as women are so devoted to this current social contract which often operates against the natural wiring of our female brains and biological reality [Author’s italics].

During the 1990s and the early part of this millennium, a new set of scientific facts and ideas about the female brain has been unfolding. These biological truths have become a powerful stimulus for the reconsideration of a woman’s social contract. In writing this book I have struggled with two voices in my head – one is the scientific truth, the other is political correctness. I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness even though scientific truths may not always be as welcome.’

How, you might well ask, can ‘almost every woman’ seeking ‘less stress with more personal time’ be reconciled with women’s alleged quests for senior positions in the workplace in general, and for executive directorships of major companies in particular? It can’t. Professor Brizendine followed The Female Brain with The Male Brain (2010). It’s larger, but less interesting. The book, that is.

Onto a book written by Simon Baron-Cohen, an eminent British psychologist. His biography on Wikipedia:

‘Simon Baron-Cohen FBA is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is the Director of the University’s Autism Research Centre, and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is best known for his work on autism, including his early theory that autism involves degrees of ‘mindblindness’ (or delays in the development of theory of mind); and his later theory that autism is an extreme form of the ‘male brain’, which involved a reconceptualisation of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathizing – systemizing theory.’

The professor’s book The Essential Difference was published in 2003. He starts by summarising the theory to be outlined in the book:

‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy.

The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’

He describes empathising in the following terms:

‘Empathising is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathising does not entail just the cold calculation of what someone else thinks and feels (or what is sometimes called mind reading). Psychopaths can do that much. Empathising occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction, an emotion triggered by the other person’s emotion, and it is done in order to understand another person, to predict their behaviour, and to connect or resonate with them emotionally.’

Systemising is described as follows:

‘Systemising is the drive to analyse, explore, and construct a system. The systemiser intuitively figures out how things work, or extracts the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system. This is done in order to understand and predict the system, or to invent a new one…

Just as empathising is powerful enough to cope with the hundreds of emotions that exist, so systemising is a process that can cope with an enormous number of systems. I will argue that, on average, males spontaneously systemise to a greater extent than do females.’

The good professor points out here – as indeed he does throughout the book – that he does not mean ‘all males’ or ‘all females’: he is talking about statistical averages. I contend that success in senior positions in major organisations requires strong systemising skills, not strong empathising skills: so without positive discrimination for women we shall never have gender balance in the boardroom. Gender balance in the boardroom is not of the slightest interest to the vast majority of women; it is of interest only to feminists, an assortment of people – almost all women – driven by left-wing ideology. David Cameron, the current British prime minister, is a feminist despite being the leader of the Conservative party. What times we live in.

Baron-Cohen writes about the advantages of systemising brains to human males early in the species’ evolution, which fell under the categories of using and making tools, hunting and tracking, trading, attaining and exercising power, developing expertise, tolerating solitude, being aggressive, and being leaders. The advantages of empathising brains to early females are explored under the categories of making friends, mothering, gossiping, being socially mobile, and reading partners’ intentions. Systemising brains are increasingly advantageous to individuals as they climb the hierarchy of major organisations, and this on its own would largely account for the enduring preponderance of men in senior positions.

Questionnaires for self-assessment of empathising and systemising natures are provided in The Essential Difference.

There’s a large and growing body of evidence supporting Baron-Cohen’s theory that people exhibiting the condition of autism – a spectrum of disorders which includes Asperger Syndrome – have ‘extreme male brains’. On average, compared to both men and women on average, they are markedly less empathising, and markedly more systemising. Baron-Cohen points out that these people can lead productive lives if their work plays to their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Some autistic men are found in the top levels of IT companies, for example. Studies of identical and non-identical twins strongly suggest that autism is heritable. In people diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome, the sex ratio is at least ten males to every female.

Baron-Cohen puts a figure of 2.5 per cent on the proportion of the population born with an extreme male brain, but what about the extreme female brain, which theory predicts should be as common? He continues:

‘All scientists know about the extreme female brain is that it is expected to arise… Scientists have never got up close to these individuals. It is a bit like positing the existence of a new animal on theoretical grounds, and then setting out to discover if it is really found in nature…

People with the extreme female brain would have average or significantly better empathising ability than that of other people in the general population, but their systemising would be impaired. So these would be people who have difficulty understanding maths or physics or machines or chemistry, as systems. But they could be extremely accurate at tuning in to others’ feelings and thoughts.

Would such a profile carry any necessary disability? Hyper-empathising could be a great asset, and poor systemising may not be too crippling. It is possible that the extreme female brain is not seen in clinics because it is not maladaptive…

A contender for who might have the extreme female brain would be a wonderfully caring person who can rapidly make you feel fully understood. For example, an endlessly patient psychotherapist who is excellent at rapidly tuning in to your feelings and your situation, who not only says he or she feels a great sadness at your sadness or great pleasure at your pleasure but also actually experiences those emotions as vividly as if your feelings were theirs.

However, the contender for the extreme female brain would also need to be someone who was virtually technically disabled. Someone for whom maths, computers, or political schisms, or DIY, held no interest. Indeed, someone who found activities requiring systemising hard to follow. We may all know people like this, but it is likely that they do not find their way into clinics, except perhaps as staff in the caring professions.’

I have a strong suspicion that many feminists have extreme female brains, although arguably the more ‘masculine’ and assertive feminists may have male brains. The former group have a highly developed sense of empathy, at least towards those of their own gender, and perceive injustice towards women wherever they look. If feminists do have extreme female brains they would also have poor systemising abilities, so they couldn’t be expected to understand evidence which conflicts with their views – in extreme female brains, emotion will always triumph over reason – even if they were willing to try. This might explain why they reject outright the notion of gender-patterned brains, and become emotional when the topic is raised.

Feminists are among those unfortunate souls genetically predisposed to hold Left-wing views, which isn’t a great starting position in the lottery of life, is it? An article in The Daily Telegraph of 29 October 2010, ‘Feeling liberal? It’s in your genes’:

‘Holding liberal views could be in the blood, scientists said after identifying a gene that makes someone more open-minded. The ‘liberal gene’ opens up a person to new ideas and alternative ways of living and could influence their belief in Left-wing politics, according to the research. It may mean that liberals are born, not made, although the effect is exacerbated if an individual has many friends during their formative years.

The ‘liberal gene’ is a transmitter in the brain called DRD4 which is connected to dopamine, known as the reward currency. Dopamine affects the way the brain experiences emotions, pleasures and pain and can therefore influence personality traits.

When adolescents with the gene are also socially outgoing with many friends, they seek and receive other people’s points of view, which triggers a pleasurable ‘reward’ of dopamine. This suggests that, as adults, they will be more open-minded and tend to form less conventional political viewpoints, the study said.

Published in the Journal of Politics, the research by scientists from the University of California and Harvard studied 2,000 Americans. It found those with a strain of the DRD4 gene seek out ‘novelty’, such as people and ways of living different from the ones they are used to. This leads them to have more politically liberal opinions, it found. The person’s age, ethnicity, gender or culture appeared to make no difference – it was the genes that counted.

Prof James Fowler, who led the research, said: ‘It is the critical interaction of two factors – the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence – that is associated with being more liberal. These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience.’ ’

The paper’s editorial on the same day contained a piece titled, ‘Lifetime cure for Lefties’:

‘Scientists have given mankind many blessings, but the discovery of the gene for Left-wing behaviour must be foremost among them. For now there is a diagnosis, there can be a cure. Just think of it – a quick screening of the unborn infant, a mild course of gene therapy, and hey presto! The disease can be eradicated within a generation.

Perhaps we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. But even if science falls short of an outright cure, it should still be possible to ameliorate the symptoms. The gene does not automatically make the carrier a Lefty; rather, it triggers the adolescent brain’s reward mechanism in the presence of novel experiences and viewpoints. The treatment is simple: lock teenage sufferers in a drab room, furnished with the works of Hayek and Friedman. True, their social skills will be somewhat stunted. But the benefits will last a lifetime.’

Canadian-American Steven Pinker is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of a number of acclaimed books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). He starts the book with the following passage on ‘The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine’:

‘Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature – that behavior is caused by thoughts and feelings – is embedded in the very way we think about people.

We fill out this theory by introspecting on our own minds and assuming that our fellows are like ourselves, and by watching people’s behavior and filing away generalizations. We absorb still other ideas from our intellectual climate: from the expertise of authorities and the conventional wisdom of the day.

Our theory of human nature is the wellspring of much in our lives. We consult it when we want to persuade or threaten, inform or deceive. It advises us on how to nurture our marriages, bring up our children, and control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning drive our educational policy; its assumptions about motivation drive our policies on economics, law, and crime. And because it delineates what people can achieve easily, what they can achieve only with sacrifice or pain, and what they cannot achieve at all, it affects our values: what we believe we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society. Rival theories of human nature are entwined in different ways of life and different political systems, and have been a source of much conflict over the course of history.’

From a later section of the chapter:

‘Every society must operate with a theory of human nature, and our intellectual mainstream is committed to one [Author’s italics]. The theory is seldom articulated or overtly embraced, but it lies at the heart of a vast number of beliefs and policies. Bertrand Russell wrote, ‘Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.’

For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

That theory of human nature – namely, that it barely exists – is the topic of this book.’

Pinker later goes on to state that, ‘The Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life’. The Blank Slate theory of human nature is commonly espoused by feminists, explicitly or implicitly. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that the theory is deeply flawed. From the same book:

‘Contrary to popular belief, parents in contemporary America do not treat their sons and daughters very differently. A recent assessment of 172 studies involving 28,000 children found that boys and girls are given similar amounts of encouragement, warmth, nurturance, restrictiveness, discipline, and clarity of communication. The only substantial difference was that about two-thirds of the boys were discouraged from playing with dolls, especially by their fathers, out of a fear that they would become gay. (Boys who prefer girls’ toys often do turn out gay, but forbidding them the toys does not change the outcome.)

Nor do differences between boys and girls depend on their observing masculine behavior in their fathers and feminine behavior in their mothers. When Hunter has two mommies, he acts just as much like a boy as if he had a mommy and a daddy.

Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from the way society treats them. If that were true, it would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way (or that one fateful flip at the dawn of the species should have been maintained without interruption across all the upheavals of the past 100,000 years).

It would be just as amazing that, time and again, society’s arbitrary assignments matched the predictions that a Martian biologist would make for our species based on our anatomy and the distribution of our genes. It would seem odd that the hormones that make us male and female in the first place also modulate the characteristically male and female mental traits, both decisively in early brain development and in smaller degrees throughout our lives.

It would be all the more odd that a second genetic mechanism differentiating the sexes (genomic imprinting) also installs characteristic male and female talents. Finally, two key predictions of the social construction theory – that boys treated as girls will grow up with girls’ minds, and that differences between boys and girls can be traced to differences in how their parents treat them – have gone down in flames.

Of course, just because many sex differences are rooted in biology does not mean that one sex is superior, that the differences will emerge for all people in all circumstances, that discrimination against a person based on sex is justified, or that people should be coerced into doing things typical of their sex. But neither are the differences without consequences.

By now many people are happy to say what was unsayable in polite company a few years ago: that males and females do not have interchangeable minds... But among many professional women the existence of sex differences is still a source of discomfort. As one colleague said to me, ‘Look, I know that males and females are not identical. I see it in my kids, I see it in myself, I know about the research. I can’t explain it, but when I read claims about sex differences, steam comes out of my ears.’ ’

The phenomenon of women becoming angry and irrational whenever their viewpoints are challenged is one that men learn to live with, often by feigning to agree with the women in their lives.

The reader interested in the biological basis of gender differences, and how they manifest themselves in the real world, will find much of interest in Why Men Don’t Iron: The Real Science of Gender Studies (1998) by Dr Anne Moir and her husband Bill. Truly a book well ahead of its time. Anne began her career as an academic scientist, winning a Doctorate from Oxford University for her genetic research. She’s now a respected and widely published authority on the rapidly developing science of neuropsychology, and the author of three international bestsellers. Her website is well worth visiting: Brainsexmatters.com.

For an illustration of how men’s and women’s natures differ, we need look no further than the Women’s Institutes. The combined membership of Women’s Institutes in the United Kingdom is around 205,000. They ‘play a unique role in providing women with educational opportunities and the chance to build new skills, to take part in a wide variety of activities and to campaign on issues that matter to them and their communities’. Membership is, not unnaturally, restricted to women.

If men had an equivalent body to the Women’s Institute – the Men’s Institute, say – and excluded women from its membership, doubtless the body would face demands from women to admit them, and change its name to the People’s Institute.

Men happily recognise that while men and women enjoy the company of the opposite sex, at times they welcome just the company of their own sex, which is why men have no problem with bodies such as the Women’s Institute, or with The Orange Prize for Fiction (a book competition open only to authoresses), or women-only competitions in sports, even when men don’t enjoy an advantage on physical strength grounds (snooker, darts etc.). But do women accord men the same courtesy? Of course not. The media these days rarely report stories of women’s hostility towards men excluding women from their activities – presumably readers are heartily fed up with the subject, and examples of men excluding women from anything are now rare – so we go back some years for a couple of articles on the matter, to look at feminists’ thinking on the matter. The first is titled, ‘Men-only clubs will not be outlawed’ from the 7 December 1999 edition of The Independent:

‘The Government last night denied reports that it has secret plans to ban men-only members clubs following admissions from ministers that clubs that barred women from membership were ‘anachronisms’.

The moves were said to be being discussed by at least four ministers, including the Cabinet Office Minister, Mo Mowlam. They would lead to the end of membership restrictions from every body ranging from the 17th century St James’s Club in London to golf clubs and the traditional Labour bastion, the working men’s club.

It was claimed that private clubs, exempted by the Sex Discrimination Act, would be modernised under an amendment to the Equal Opportunities Bill in the next session of parliament. Senior Labour figures are said to be heartened by recent about-turns by men-only stalwarts such as the MCC which last year voted to admit women after 211 years.

A Government spokesman rejected reports of new laws in the pipeline. Many topics were covered in ministerial discussions on equality but Government plans for anti-discrimination legislation did not extend beyond public bodies.

Last night Nicholas Soames MP, the former Tory defence minister, who is a member of White’s, Pratt’s and the Turf, said: ‘This is another sign that living under New Labour is like living in Soviet Russia. What sensible woman wants to be a member of a men’s club?’ ’

A good point, Mr Soames, and well made. Now there’s a man you can imagine tucking enthusiastically into rhubarb crumble and custard at his club. The following article was printed in the paper the next day, titled ‘The Irritations of Modern Life: Men-only Clubs’:

‘I have often wondered what men do in all-male clubs. Million-pound deals? Homosexual rituals? Men, especially if they belong to the Garrick Club, are reticent, giving the impression that it involves little more than long lunches, at which they get slightly squiffy and eat nursery food. Yet, as soon as someone proposes changing the law to force such clubs to admit women, it is as if the very foundations of civilisation had begun to shudder.

‘A grotesque curtailment of freedom of association – an almost totalitarian assertion that the state should be able to decide with whom you can spend your own free time on property private to you...’ is how The Daily Telegraph greeted the news that the Government is thinking of banning men-only establishments. Yikes! Next thing you know, Tony Blair will be personally knocking on Telegraph readers’ doors, pushing a female across the threshold and instructing them to talk to her.

Of course, there are few subjects so likely to fire up a right-wing leader-writer. The age-old right of the British upper classes to exclude outsiders is slowly being whittled away. The Reform Club has admitted women for years; even Lord’s is not the bastion it was. What’s left for the man who sometimes feels the need to be with people who, not to put too fine a point on it, aren’t going to go all funny and exhibit symptoms of pre-menstrual tension?

Men’s clubs are an anachronism. Their very existence institutionalises discrimination, draping it with a veil of respectability. When I witnessed the reaction to this mild move towards equality, I felt as if I’d been transported back to a time when misogyny was so firmly taken for granted that most people didn’t even have a name for it. Now we do, and it’s not acceptable. The bad news for club bores, tucking into bread-and-butter pudding in Covent Garden – or, indeed, a working men’s club in Halifax – is that the time has come to grow up.’

Ah yes. ‘An anachronism.’ ‘The time has come to grow up.’ I don’t suppose the journalist – a lady – is quite so agitated by the Women’s Institute, even many years later. And with such arguments women seek to hide the real reasons they want to stop men associating freely with one another, whatever they are. Maybe they’ve learned of our plan to withdraw voting rights from them. Damn. We’ve managed to keep that under wraps for years. On to Woman’s Hour, a staple of BBC Radio. From their website:

‘October 7 1946 was the start of something big – it was the first broadcast of a programme designed to celebrate, entertain and inform women.’

I’ve never heard a man suggest there should be a programme for men, Man’s Hour possibly, ‘a programme designed to celebrate, entertain and inform men’.

I often heard Woman’s Hour when driving around the country on business, and did so on 27 April 2009. It’s often an interesting programme but some topics come up with mind-numbing regularity. One is the so-called ‘gender pay gap’, annoyingly – to some people, at least – still a reality 40 years after the 1970 Equal Pay Act. The report concerned Harriet Harman who was putting forward the Equality Bill, which included provisions to require organisations to publish individuals’ salaries. The inference, as always, was that women are discriminated against by men.

But the gender pay gap isn’t attributable to discrimination against women once a number of factors are taken into account, such as choice of profession, career breaks for having children, many women preferring part-time work, and women taking earlier retirement than men. Not that you’ll ever hear this mentioned on Woman’s Hour. Or at least I haven’t heard it in the past 30 years of listening occasionally to the programme.

A later discussion in the same episode concerned women giving up highly paid stressful jobs to enable them to work for themselves, often on low incomes, or to do jobs they found more fulfilling. One of the women had been a ‘high-flying lawyer’. The general tone of the discussion was a celebration of women who decided to forsake lucrative but demanding jobs in favour of more job satisfaction. One woman made the following observation:

‘So many women I know are crying themselves to sleep on a Sunday night, because they really can’t bear the thought of going to work the next day.’

No connection was made by the good ladies on the programme between the gender pay gap and women voluntarily opting out of highly paid, stressful, unfulfilling jobs. Nor was it considered worth raising that even if a gender pay gap did still exist, it might be attributable to men being more willing than women to continue with such jobs. And so the myths of discrimination against women and the ‘glass ceiling’ roll on year after year.

The enthusiasm with which politicians – both female and male – keep perpetuating the myth of the gender pay gap is surely a testimony to its enduring vote-delivering powers among female voters. In October 2010 Prime Minister David Cameron, during a major interview on BBC television, made a ridiculous statement: that the difference between men’s pay and women’s pay was ‘scandalous’.

Many women work to achieve financial security, but this is generally not their preferred option. Women’s search for financial security has traditionally focused on securing a higher status partner, and this has remained unchanged into the modern era. In his 1998 book The Secrets of Love and Lust, Simon Andreae had some interesting things to say about women’s search for ‘Mr Right’:

‘Handsome men will pass their physical advantages down to the children of whoever they mate with, giving those children a head-start in the race for reproductive success. The indices of conventional male good looks – a rugged jaw, broad shoulders, a full head of hair and a healthy physique – are also indications of genetic health and strength. Yet looks in the opposite sex seem to be less important to women than they are to men, and less important than other factors.

In Douglas Kenrick’s study of the percentages required of potential partners before women would consent to dating, having sex, steady dating or marrying them, ‘good looks’ was the only criterion where women, across the board, were ready to accept a lower percentage value than men. They were even prepared to consider men of below-average physical attractiveness… as long as they had other things to offer…

In Glenn Wilson’s study of British sexual fantasies, men were found to fantasise more frequently about group sex than any of the other scenarios he presented to them. But women had a very different fantasy life. For them, by far the most characteristic fantasy was straight, monogamous sex with a famous personality. The argument runs that famous men today, like village headmen in the past, and successful hunters during the early period in which we evolved, would have acquired the status and resources to furnish a woman and her children with more food and protection than the next man.

Over the incremental advances of time, evolution would therefore have favoured women who developed mental programmes which allowed them to judge the signs of status within their particular environment and culture, and calibrate their desire accordingly.

Fame is not the only indicator of a man who is high in status and rich in resources. In 1986 the American psychologist Elizabeth Hill published the results of an experiment in which she asked her students to describe what sort of clothes they considered high-status men to wear, and what sort of clothes they considered low-status men to wear. Among the former were smart suits, polo shirts, designer jeans and expensive watches; among the latter were nondescript jeans, tank tops and T-shirts.

She then photographed a number of different men in variations of both styles of dress and showed the photographs to a different group of female students, asking them to rate each one for attractiveness. Overall, the same models were found more attractive when wearing the high-status costumes than when wearing the low-status ones.

It’s important to note, though, that it’s not just status symbols, and resources they indicate, that women find attractive. It’s also those personality characteristics which indicate the capacity to acquire such symbols in the future. In most cultures, women rarely have the luxury of being able to wait for a man to achieve all that he sets out to do before pairing up with him; as a result they have to calibrate his desirability partly on unrealised potential.

To find out what these characteristics of future success might be, and to see how they correlated with female desire, psychologist Michael Wiederman examined more than a thousand personal ads placed in various American periodicals between January and June 1992. He speculated that, in an arena where men and women were paying to attract potential mates, they would be more than usually forthright in specifying the attributes they sought, and more than usually direct in how they expressed their priorities.

Taking the various descriptions of what people wanted, and arranging them into categories, Wiederman noticed that terms denoting high status and plentiful resources (terms such as ‘business owner’, ‘enjoys the finer things’, ‘successful’, ‘wealthy’, ‘well-to-do’, and ‘financially affluent’) cropped up ten times as often in the women’s wish lists as in the men’s.

But there was also a considerable female preference for terms like ‘ambitious’, ‘industrious’, ‘career-oriented’, and ‘college-educated’; in other words, for terms which clearly indicated the potential to acquire status and amass resources in the future…

Douglas Kenrick, in his study of how intelligent, attractive and so on men and women had to be before they were considered sexually attractive by the opposite sex, found that earning capacity was much more important to women than to men; and David Buss, in a massive study of mating habits which covered 10,000 people in 37 cultures around the world, found that women rated financial resources on average at least twice as highly as men did.

Some researchers argue that an evolutionary explanation is not justified here. Women only desire wealthy men, they say, because most cultures don’t allow women to make much money for themselves. But the female preference for wealth seems to exist regardless of the financial status of the women in question.

There is an unprecedented number of independent, self-supporting women with resources of their own in the world today, yet their mate preferences still seem to be following the age-old, evolved pattern of looking for men who can offer more.

One study of American newly-wed couples in 1993 found that financially successful brides placed an even greater importance on their husbands’ earning capacities than those who were less well-off. And another, conducted among female college students, reported that those who were likely to earn more in respected professions placed greater importance on the financial prospects of their potential husbands than those who were likely to earn less. Buss’s fellow psychologist Bruce Ellis summed up the prospect for future mate choice by saying, ‘Women’s sexual tastes become more, rather than less, discriminatory as their wealth, power, and social status increase.’ ’

So there you have it. Even in an era of equal opportunities in the world of work women remain keen that in their relationships with men resources flow in one direction only: to them from men. Where’s the fairness or equality in that? Women seek fairness and equality only when they believe they’ll be advantaged by it, never when they’ll be disadvantaged by it. Which begs the obvious question: why aren’t men revolting? The surprisingly simple answer to that question is to be found in a later chapter imaginatively titled, ‘Why aren’t men revolting?’

Why are some women bothered by whether or not gender balance exists in the boardroom? In my view it’s the same childish impulse to grasp what men have which lies behind women’s claims to half their ex-partners’ wealth after a marriage fails: regardless of the woman’s contribution to the couple’s wealth, the duration of the marriage, or the reason for the marriage failure. And if that’s equality, I’m a crème brûlée.

Let’s consider the issue of female attractiveness in the workplace. While women commonly decry societal pressures to be attractive – although many are evidently immune to the pressures – attractive women themselves don’t hesitate to exploit their attractiveness for all it’s worth in both their working and personal lives. You have to assume they’ve figured out that’s a great deal easier than working hard to get ahead in the world.

In a business career of over 30 years’ duration I was fortunate to know a number of women who, when younger, progressed further and faster with the help of their looks. Good looks were an advantage for them on at least two grounds. All else being equal senior executives would promote an attractive women rather than an unattractive one – just as they might reasonably promote a cheerful colleague rather than a moody one – and clients preferred to deal with attractive women, obviously. Over time these women’s attractiveness faded so I was to encounter the irony of hearing them later in their careers bemoaning the promotions of younger, more attractive women than themselves.

We end the chapter with an activity which interests few men, but which has been described as most women’s favourite hobby: shopping. Women’s fondness for shopping is an indicator of at least two ways in which their natures differ from men’s. On the one hand it indicates women’s preference for spending money over working for it in the first place, which is also evident in their propensity to eschew paid employment or to work only part-time. On the other hand it reveals women’s herd instinct, which is nowhere as clearly displayed as in their pursuit of branded clothing, shoes, handbags etc.

In July 2011 Prince William and his fetching bride (formerly Kate Middleton) undertook a Royal tour of Canada. The tabloid press routinely named the retail outlets from which her clothes were bought, and a television ‘fashion commentator’ – could there really be such a vacuous job? – informed us breathlessly that retailers sold out of stock of the items in question within hours of their provenance being revealed. The retailers favoured by Prince William were never mentioned, and with good reason; who on earth would have been interested?