See an excerpt here.

Our thanks to gender equality researcher Greg Andreson for this concise analysis of a report published in Australia this week, which backs up what Alex said. Differences in pay and work result from the different choices and priorities men and women have, rather than from discrimination.

“Even though this new report commissioned by the Office for Women found no evidence of discrimination against women (it just assumed it), the government still presumes that women are treated less than equally in the workplace. The report found that factors such as women’s choices of careers, jobs and work hours, consideration of caring responsibilities, women’s work motivations, bargaining power and appetite for risk, industry segregation and labour force history, all impact on the so-called ‘wage-gap’. In other words, in general, women choose work that pays less as a trade-off for other rewards such as family, safety/health and job satisfaction. Interestingly the Office for Women didn’t commission a study into women’s spending power. If they had, they would have found, as previous studies have done, that women are responsible for spending 70% of family incomes (while men are responsible for earning the majority of family incomes). Who has the real power – the person who earns or the person who spends?”

Recently, however, it has been put to me in debates that this model of family is in fact a recent development. So I thought I’d look into it.

A Brief Global History (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008) argues that it was not until the 17th and 18th century that the nuclear family became a viable social unit, and Elaine Tyler May argues [Pushing the Limits: American Women 1940-1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)] that the delevopment of what we think of as the traditional family, with father as bread-winner and mother as home-maker, did not in fact emerge until after World War 2!

The other side of the argument is best presented, I think, by the results of an acheological dig in Elau, Germany, in 2005. It was a stoneage burial site comprising 13 individuals, and genetic analysis showed them to be a mother, father, 2 children, and other close relatives. As Prof Wolfgang Haak, who analysed the results said: “By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe.”

This reassures me. My belief that the traditional family has been around a long time is, after all, based in fact, and we must be the most stupid generation of all time to want to dispense with it.

Ray Barry

So what do you expect if you have something called an ‘Equality Minister’? She will impose gross injustice wherever she can in the interests of a coercive and preposterous ideology. Harriet Harman’s proposal that companies should positively discriminate in favour of women job candidates (ie discriminate against men) is yet another example of the way in which feminism got hijacked and turned from a campaign for fairness for women into an onslaught against men. Her proposal is not only totally unfair — job candidates should be appointed on grounds of merit, not chromosomes – but is based on the false premise that the gender pay gap proves that women are the victims of systematic discrimination in the workplace.

But this is simply untrue. Granted that there are indeed specific instances of discrimination against women, the generalised claim is false because it ignores the differences in behaviour between women and men at work. As academics such as Professor Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics have long argued, such iconic feminist causes as the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘gender pay gap’ are in very large measure the outcome of the choices made by women themselves.

Of course there are exceptions, but in general women have very different expectations from men about work. That’s because many women have another set of competing priorities – child rearing. As a result, they tend to want to work part-time. Even those who work full-time tend not to put in the same hours of overtime and so forth that men do because they are less interested in getting to the top of their profession — mainly because unlike men they don’t usually define themselves through work and have less interest in power and status and all those guy things. All these factors mean that even if they are doing the same jobs as men they are not doing it in the same way. So why should they expect to be paid the same?

In fact, women are not exactly going to the barricades over this issue. It’s only Harriet Harperson and the sisterhood who are agitating about this because it’s all part of their anti-man agenda. It’s an economic variation on what they did to rape law, whereby they forced through changes which loaded the legal dice against male defendants in rape cases because the conviction rate in such cases was said to be ‘too low’. But that presupposes that the men in such cases are all guilty and their female accusers never tell a lie – two propositions which have been proved over and over again to be wrong, quite apart from ditching the presumption of innocence which helps define a free society. Nevertheless the law was changed and pressure continues to be applied to make even more changes to get the rape conviction rate up. Because whether in the workplace or the bedroom, as we know, all men are guilty of the oppression of women.

It is a great mistake to write off Harriet Harman, as many do, on grounds of demonstrable stupidity. She is one of this administration’s great survivors. One of the reasons she has survived has been her ruthless use of the woman card against men who haven’t got the cojones to stand up against this gender bullying. Let’s hope that this time, with the business world up in arms, her latest wheeze is dismissed with the contumely it deserves.

This morning we see in the press yet one more plank in the Government’s campaign to vilify and demoralise boys. Psychologist Linda Papadopolous published her report on the sexualisation of youngsters. Commissioned by the Home office, the report finds what everyone already knows, that children are exposed to inappropriate sexual images. The sub-text to the report, however, is that girls are victims of sexual abuse and boys are to blame.

The facts of domestic abuse are studiously ignored as this band-wagon rolls on. The British Crime survey shows that young men, rather than young women, are the group most likely to experience domestic abuse. The recent NSPCC survey, published as part of this same campaign, concluded that while 25% of girls experienced violence in relationships, so did 18% of boys.

While the evidence points to domestic violence and domestic abuse being something which impacts on boys and girls in approximately equal numbers, all of the attention is given to girls as victims and boys as abusers. This is not true academic reporting, and the likes of NSPCC and Linda Papadopolous should be ashamed of their part in it. The fact that they were paid out of a programme called “violence against women and girls” gives a clue to the findings they were expected to come up with, and they dutifully wrote what the pay-master wanted. They would, after all, hope to get more work from this source, wouldn’t they?

The simple fact is that this campaign is nothing more than propapaganda, driven by a feminist core within Government, and it is crushing and oppressing the spirit of our young men and boys.

A British Airways Policy which presupposes that only men are paedophiles. Don’t they read the papers?

Hear the interview

It is boys rather than girls who are disadvantaged these days in schooling. They are the ones who need encouragement, so why visit a single-sex school, and why make it girls rather than boys?

Teaching styles are increasingly geared towards the way girls learn, boys are excluded from school in increasing numbers for stepping out of line; should we be surprised if they feel second class in our school system, and de-motivated, and might they see Ms Obama’s visit and her words as one more slap in the face to them. Did she reflect on the impact this visit might have on boys who see it in newspapers or on TV?

Giving advantage to women and girls is no longer about creating equality by raising them to a level playing field. The pendulum has swung the other way, but we have a generation of professional women who are programmed to see females as disadvantaged victims, and are unable to see them in any other light.