Gender

I am taken to task by the Guardian’s Ally Fogg for my Telegraph column on the growing underachievement of boys. It’s a thoughtful and spunky piece, which I thought worth replying to here. The phenomenon of male underperformance causes much angst on the left, demanding a choice between feminism and equality. For anyone born after Perry Como was in the charts, women are no longer underperforming. When law and medicine graduates are 60pc female, and girls a third more likely to apply to university than boys, we’re not looking at equality. We’re looking at a new inequality being incubated, because male horizons are narrowing. The notions of feminism and equality are

In tomorrow’s Spectator, Rod Liddle gives his verdict on the social media storm caused by Suzanne Moore and then Julie Burchill. Liddle suggests that until the ‘entire bourgeois bien-pensant left’ self-immolates, leaving a slight scent of goji berries, bystanders can ‘enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves’. He describes Burchill’s Observer  as ‘easily the best piece the paper has carried in a decade’, and then examines the response of the government and the Observer’s editor: ‘At which point

I’m afraid that women have been faking it, having us men on. You see they understand the offside rule and always have done. How could they not? It’s so simple that even a brace of abject football pundits know that an actively involved player is offside when he is closer to the opponent’s goal line than both the ball and the second-to-last defender, but only if he is in his opponent’s half of the pitch. Messrs Keys and Gray may not be too sharp on interpretation – unlike the ‘young lady’ (£) they berated – but they’re smoking hot on the theory. So do me a favour love and drop

Nick Clegg’s announcement on the extension of paternity leave has been drowned by the cacophony surrounding NHS reform. The government is keen to describe itself as family friendly – with the exception of Vulgaria in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, all government’s do. Clegg hopes to bring flexibility to the workplace and relieve young mothers who would like to return to work. It’s an admirable aim, but there is only so far socially manipulative legislation can go before it becomes grossly counter-productive. David Frost, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, has made a strong case against further law. “Last week we saw changes to the default retirement age, in

It is received gardening wisdom that men tend lawns and women plant flowers. This is a good year to see how two exceptional writers on gardens live up to that definition. Our top horticultural columnists, Anna Pavord of the Independent and Robin Lane Fox of the Financial Times, have both published elegant and witty collections of journalism in 2010. Lane Fox’s Thoughtful Gardening (Particular Books, £25) has already been reviewed in The Spectator. For the purposes of male/ female comparison I can record that Lane Fox writes that flower gardening is what interests him, which makes a nonsense of received wisdom. He does not appear to mow much, but he

Gender discrimination is illegal in Britain – but tell that to the recession. It has hit male jobs harder than female jobs and in a cover story for this week’s Spectator, Matthew Lynn looks behind it. This has been, he says, a Mancession, where “the jobs lost in the last two years have tended to be ones done by men, whereas the preponderance of new vacancies are in areas of the economy in which women do best.” I asked the ONS for the official figures – and here they are:   They show that, if you count everyone in Britain employed over the age of 16, there has been a