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By Root 531 0

So I am dangerously close to arguing that a woman’s place is in the home, while her husband works as breadwinner. Yet that conclusion does not at all follow from the logic presented here. The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savannah-dwelling ape. It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman. If, in the Pleistocene, men went off from the home base on long hunts, while women went a shorter distance to gather plants, then maybe men are mentally better suited to long commutes. But neither is evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day and talk into the telephone, or sit at a factory bench all day tightening screws. The fact that ‘work’ became a male thing and ‘home’ a female one is an accident of history: the domestication of cattle and the invention of the plough made food gathering a task that benefited from male muscle power. In societies where the land is tilled by hand, women do most of the work. The industrial revolution reinforced the trend. But the postindustrial revolution – the recent growth of service industries – is reversing it again. Women are going ‘out to work’ again as they did when they sought tubers and berries in the Pleistocene.24

Therefore, there is absolutely no justification from evolutionary biology for the view that men should earn and women should darn their socks. There may be professions, such as car mechanic or big-game hunter, that men are psychologically more suited to than women, just as there are professions, such as doctor and nanny, that women are probably naturally better at. But there is no general support in biology for sexism about careers.

Indeed, in a curious way, an evolutionary perspective justifies affirmative action more than a more egalitarian philosophy would. For it implies that women have different ambitions even more than different abilities. Men’s reproductive success depended for generations on climbing political hierarchies. Women have rarely had an incentive to seek success of that kind, for their reproductive success depended on other things. Therefore, evolutionary thinking predicts that women will often not seek to climb political ladders, but it says nothing about how good they will be if they do. I suggest it is no accident that women have reached the top rung (as prime minister in many countries) in numbers disproportionate to their strength on the lower rungs. I suggest that it is no accident that the queens of Britain have a far more distinguished and consistent history than the kings. The evidence suggests that women are on average slightly better than men at running countries. The evidence supports the feminist assertion that there are female touches they bring to such jobs – intuition, character judgement, lack of self-worship – that men can only envy. Since the bane of all organizations, whether they are companies, charities or governments, is that they reward cunning ambition rather than ability (the people who are good at getting to the top are not necessarily the people who are best at doing the job), and since men are more endowed with such ambition than women, it is absolutely right that promotion should be biased in favour of women. Not to redress prejudice, but to redress human nature.

And, of course, to represent the woman’s point of view. Feminists believe that women need to be proportionally represented in Parliament or Congress because women have a different agenda. They are right if women are by nature different. If they were the same as men, there would be no reason for men not to represent women’s interests as competently as they represent men’s. To believe in sexual equality is just. To believe in sexual identity is a most peculiar and unfeminist thing to do.

Feminists who recognize this contradiction are pilloried for their pains. Camille Paglia, literary critic and gadfly, is one of the few who sees that feminism is trying an impossible trick: to change the nature of men while insisting that the nature of women is unchangeable. She argues that men are not closet women