The three areas of endeavour in which women are paid more than men for equivalent work are Tennis, Modelling and Porn, and this is because we men like to look at pretty girls. Preferably naked, but a short skirt will do. Or one with all see-through bits like Jasper Conran‘s latest catwalk show.

Let’s go back to sport. I don’t know why women get offended by people choosing to watch pretty tennis players. The motivation for women to watch rugby always seems to involve the word “thighs”. Do I feel objectified? I like pretty tennis players because I am biologically programmed to seek out healthy, youthful-looking women as mates. Girls like muscular Rugby players because they are programmed to seek out dominant, physically fit men to give their offspring the best genetic inheritance. A pretty face, and large size are some of the unfakable caricteristics with which men and women signal their biological fitness to each other. The fact is we are, as the Bloodhound gang pointed out, “nothing but Mammals”. Men and women want to check each other out, and then get to grips with those they fancy. Because we like different characteristics in each other, men and women have evolved to please the opposite sex’s predilections leading to sexual dimorphism.

You may not like me saying what I am about to say, but I do not like reading “men are redundant” in what is supposed to be Britain’s paper of record. Wishful thinking based on better exam marks does not mean the hairy half of the human race is ‘worthless’. Men are not redundant. Despite male performance in academia falling behind that of females, this can be put down to Girls’ greater diligence, and the increase in coursework, which favours the ‘female’ way of doing things over exams, which in general favour boys.

Life is a little less fair, and more rewarding of risk-taking than school. Whatever the exam results, Men are largely responsible for the advances which have seen people’s life expectancy at birth to reach 80, as for all their dominance at university, few Girls take a pure science. Name me one thing a woman has invented, Or one field of human endeavour in which a woman has blazed the trail. For every Marie Curie, there’s a dozen men of greater achievement: Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin leap to mind. Would you pay to watch women play sport? Don’t say ‘yes’, the audience figures on TV and in the stands shout otherwise.

These are facts. There are many reasons for this. Women are on average more risk averse, preferring the safe, if less remunerative job. Women are weaker, more prone to injury if subjected to physical exertion, and therefore aren’t as much fun to watch competing. In any case, Women tend to be more consensual, preferring cooperation to vigorous debate, and tend to be less competitive. Which is why they rarely come up with ground-breaking innovation, which requires a bloody minded arrogance that you know best which is much more common in men. Naturally these characteristics are variables, there are women with male pattern behaviour, and vice versa, but there is no doubt where the mean lies, and this explains much of the difference in representation in Boardrooms, trading floors, politics and the upper echelons of professions. When you adjust for the fact that women on average prioritise job security, and do more part-time work, and above all, have and raise children the Gender pay gap becomes the motherhood pay gap. There is a no gender pay gap amongst the single, childless population.

The sisterhood will probably put all this down to “society imposing gender roles” or something, but there are important biological differences, which any attempt to explain away with social-science wishful thinking renders their entire political philosophy ridiculous; like Frances in The Life of Brian, it is pointless to fight for “Men’s right to have children”. Women have less testosterone, which makes men aggressive and take risks. Women are often observed to have lager Corpus Callosae which enable the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate and is responsible for Women’s much vaunted
inability to focus on one thing at a timeability to multitask. Women also have 2 copies of the X chromosome, whereas men have just one and the much smaller Y. This means men express many more recessive alleles, and therefore have greater phenotypic variety than women. The male normal distribution in many measures is platykurtic. Thus there are more male Geniuses, and more dunces, whilst the mean intelligence is the same for both genders. So perhaps we should not expect to see women equally represented in boardrooms and parliament, if society is, as it is supposed to be, meritocratic. There are just more remarkable (and remarkably stupid) men than women.

Then there’s the undeniable fact of parturition. Women give birth and men generally don’t. When they do, women more often than not want to nurture their offspring. Those years taken out of the workforce, and female preference for safer, less well paid work explain almost all of the Gender pay gap. Men, if they’ve been given a say by the mother of their child tend to feel the urge to provide. Married men with kids work harder and earn more than their single, childless peers. Which again leads us to the ‘Men are redundant’ meme. Are single mothers happy? No. It appears that women choosing to have children out of wedlock is a large contributory factor in women’s happiness declining relative to men since the 1970s.

Most people need a significant other to be happy, and for the majority of people, that means someone of the opposite sex. Herein lies the problem – the opposite sex are space aliens, because as I outlined above, men and women are not the same. We should try to understand each other, and have sex rather than engage in a futile battle of the sexes. But accept that for all the necessary equality, men and women are likely to be very different. Complimentary, but different.

But there is the question of what, if anything public policy can do to address these issues. My solution is to allow genuine choice. There are options available to Men and Women which include Nuclear Families, Childlessness, Single Motherhood, Celibacy. The state should not be sanctioning people’s life choices, and measuring things like the gender pay gap or the number of women in Board-rooms lead to measures to do something about it which may well be worse than the disease. As are policies like defining marriage so as to exclude homosexuals. Single or homosexual parents may not be ideal (and even that is debatable), but what is certain is that a loving home is better than state “care”. Whenever the state intervenes in people’s lives, it creates perverse incentives and misery.

Take parliament. There are many fewer women than men on the green benches. But fewer women put themselves forward than men, probably for reasons outlined above. If 80% of applicants for a job are men, then if everything else is equal you would expect 80% of the successful candidates to be men. By this measure men are discriminated AGAINST in politics. It is therefore reasonable to argue more women should be persuaded to apply for politics, in the interests of better representation. It is not reasonable to look at a very male House of Commons and cite this as evidence of discrimination. Just as the Labour party enshrines discrimination with all-woman shortlists, Harriet Harman, by comparing Male full time work with female part-time work to come up with a Gender pay gap of 17% is guilty of the abuse of statistics to justify what she already thinks is necessary: more anti-discrimination legislation.

I am not arguing for a return to traditional gender roles. Nor am I arguing that women are on average less able. Nor am I arguing that discrimination should be tolerated. Just that with the complexities involved it would be better from a public policy point of view if we were all treated as individual people, not put into gender boxes, by making the insane assumption that men will choose the same things in the same numbers as women.

Now overt discrimination is a thing of the past, better just to let people get on with their lives, without being told they’re a failure if they want to bring up children, or take a safer, easier job for better quality of life. Or indeed if they work every hour of the day to provide for a family, or even buy a bigger car. How about just accepting that people whether they’re men or women are the experts in the incentives in their own lives and react accordingly? Because if you’re arguing for more state regulation, when you look at the evidence it rarely tells the story you wish to tell.