Nor are the kibbutzim unique: Even in liberated Scandinavia, it is women who feed the family, wash the clothes, and care for the children. Even where women go to work, some professions remain male bastions (for instance, garage mechanics, air-traffic controllers, driving test examiners, architects), while others have become female bastions (for instance, bank tellers, elementary school teachers, secretaries, interpreters): It is getting gradually more implausible to maintain that in the most egalitarian Western societies women are prevented by social prejudice from becoming garage mechanics. Women rarely want to become garage mechanics: They do not want to become garage mechanics because the world of the garage mechanic is an uninviting "man ' s world " in which they would feel unwelcome. But why is it a man 's world? Because it is a job that men have molded to suit their personalities, and male personalities are different from female ones.
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FEMINISM AND DETERMINISM
The bizarre thing about this assertion of different natures is that it is a thoroughly feminist assertion: There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently: So feminism itself is anything but egalitarian: Feminists argue explicitly that if more women were in charge, more caring values would prevaiclass="underline" They begin from the presumption that women are by nature different beings: If women ran the world, there would be no war: When women run companies, cooperation, not competition, is the watchword: These are all explicit and firm assertions of sexism: that the personalities and natures of women are different from men. If women ' s personalities are different, is it not likely that they will prove better or worse at certain jobs than men? Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not:
Nor does it help to appeal to social pressure as the source of personality differences: If social pressure is as powerful as social scientists would have us believe, then a person 's nature is irrelevant; only his or her background counts: A man from a broken home who has led a life of crime is the product of that experience, and there is no spark of decent "nature" in his soul to redeem: Of course we scoff at such nonsense: We recognize him to be a product of both his background and his nature: It is the same with sex differences: To say that Western women do not enter politics in the same numbers as men because they have been conditioned to think of it as a man 's career is to patronize women: Politics is all about status-seeking ambition, which many women have a healthy cynicism about: Women have their own minds: They are capable of deciding to enter politics if they want to, whatever society says (and Western society, if anything, now affirms that they should). One of the things that make a political career uninviting may well be the sexism of those around them, but it is absurd to assume it is the only thing.
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The Red Queen
I have argued that men and women are different and that some of these differences stem from an evolutionary past in which men hunted and women gathered. So I am dangerously close to arguing that a woman 's place is in the home while her husband works as the 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 savanna-dwelling ape: It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman.
If in the Pleistocene period 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 a 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 plow 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 post industrial 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 period."
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 and 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 often will not seek to climb political SEXING THE MIND
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ladders, but it says nothing about how good they would be if they did: I suggest it is no accident that women have reached the top rung (as the prime minister in many countries) in numbers dispro-portionate to their strength on the lower rungs. I suggest that it is no accident that 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 men can only envy the female touches they bring to such jobs—intuition, character judgment, lack of self-worship. 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 favor of women—not to redress prejudice but to redress human nature.
And also, of course, to represent the woman 's point of view.
Feminists believe that women need to be proportionally represented in Parliament and 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 and women are not 2