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symbols in the future. In most cultures, women rarely have the luxury of being able to wait for a man to achieve all that he sets out to do before pairing up with him; as a result they have to calibrate his desirability partly on unrealised potential.

      To find out what these characteristics of future success might be, and to see how they correlated with female desire, psychologist Michael Wiederman examined more than a thousand personal ads placed in various American periodicals between January and June 1992. He speculated that, in an arena where men and women were paying to attract potential mates, they would be more than usually forthright in specifying the attributes they sought, and more than usually direct in how they expressed their priorities.

      Taking the various descriptions of what people wanted, and arranging them into categories, Wiederman noticed that terms denoting high status and plentiful resources (terms such as ‘business owner’, ‘enjoys the finer things’, ‘successful’, ‘wealthy’, ‘well-to-do’, and ‘financially affluent’) cropped up ten times as often in the women’s wish lists as in the men’s.

      But there was also a considerable female preference for terms like ‘ambitious’, ‘industrious’, ‘career-oriented’, and ‘college-educated’; in other words, for terms which clearly indicated the potential to acquire status and amass resources in the future…

      Douglas Kenrick, in his study of how intelligent, attractive and so on men and women had to be before they were considered sexually attractive by the opposite sex, found that earning capacity was much more important to women than to men; and David Buss, in a massive study of mating habits which covered 10,000 people in 37 cultures around the world, found that women rated financial resources on average at least twice as highly as men did.

      Some researchers argue that an evolutionary explanation is not justified here. Women only desire wealthy men, they say, because most cultures don’t allow women to make much money for themselves. But the female preference for wealth seems to exist regardless of the financial status of the women in question.

      There is an unprecedented number of independent, self-supporting women with resources of their own in the world today, yet their mate preferences still seem to be following the age-old, evolved pattern of looking for men who can offer more.

      One study of American newly-wed couples in 1993 found that financially successful brides placed an even greater importance on their husbands’ earning capacities than those who were less well-off. And another, conducted among female college students, reported that those who were likely to earn more in respected professions placed greater importance on the financial prospects of their potential husbands than those who were likely to earn less. Buss’s fellow psychologist Bruce Ellis summed up the prospect for future mate choice by saying, ‘Women’s sexual tastes become more, rather than less, discriminatory as their wealth, power, and social status increase.’ ’

      So there you have it. Even in an era of equal opportunities in the world of work women remain keen that in their relationships with men resources flow in one direction only: to them from men. Where’s the fairness or equality in that? Women seek fairness and equality only when they believe they’ll be advantaged by it, never when they’ll be disadvantaged by it. Which begs the obvious question: why aren’t men revolting? The surprisingly simple answer to that question is to be found in a later chapter imaginatively titled, ‘Why aren’t men revolting?’

      Why are some women bothered by whether or not gender balance exists in the boardroom? In my view it’s the same childish impulse to grasp what men have which lies behind women’s claims to half their ex-partners’ wealth after a marriage fails: regardless of the woman’s contribution to the couple’s wealth, the duration of the marriage, or the reason for the marriage failure. And if that’s equality, I’m a crème brûlée.

      Let’s consider the issue of female attractiveness in the workplace. While women commonly decry societal pressures to be attractive – although many are evidently immune to the pressures – attractive women themselves don’t hesitate to exploit their attractiveness for all it’s worth in both their working and personal lives. You have to assume they’ve figured out that’s a great deal easier than working hard to get ahead in the world.

      In a business career of over 30 years’ duration I was fortunate to know a number of women who, when younger, progressed further and faster with the help of their looks. Good looks were an advantage for them on at least two grounds. All else being equal senior executives would promote an attractive women rather than an unattractive one – just as they might reasonably promote a cheerful colleague rather than a moody one – and clients preferred to deal with attractive women, obviously. Over time these women’s attractiveness faded so I was to encounter the irony of hearing them later in their careers bemoaning the promotions of younger, more attractive women than themselves.

      We end the chapter with an activity which interests few men, but which has been described as most women’s favourite hobby: shopping. Women’s fondness for shopping is an indicator of at least two ways in which their natures differ from men’s. On the one hand it indicates women’s preference for spending money over working for it in the first place, which is also evident in their propensity to eschew paid employment or to work only part-time. On the other hand it reveals women’s herd instinct, which is nowhere as clearly displayed as in their pursuit of branded clothing, shoes, handbags etc.

      In July 2011 Prince William and his fetching bride (formerly Kate Middleton) undertook a Royal tour of Canada. The tabloid press routinely named the retail outlets from which her clothes were bought, and a television ‘fashion commentator’ – could there really be such a vacuous job? – informed us breathlessly that retailers sold out of stock of the items in question within hours of their provenance being revealed. The retailers favoured by Prince William were never mentioned, and with good reason; who on earth would have been interested?

      13| THE DENIAL OF THE DIFFERENT NATURES OF MEN AND WOMEN

      Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

      Henry Miller 1891-1980 American novelist and painter: Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion) (1949)

      Feminists contend that erroneous beliefs about the different natures of men and women partly account for the ‘oppression’ of women over the course of history, and continue to be used in the modern era to justify ‘discrimination’ against women. They invariably attribute observed differences between boys and girls, as well as men and women, to ‘social conditioning’, although this leads them to some farcical positions.

      An example may illustrate the point. While feminists flatly deny there are differences between the brains of men and women – despite clear evidence to the contrary, including physiological evidence – they credit women with superiority in some areas of cognition, as exemplified by the bizarre ‘women’s ways of knowing’ theory we’ll be exploring later. How can the two positions be equated? They can’t, unless feminists believe ‘women’s ways of knowing’ arise from an organ other than the brain. Maybe they’ll let us know some day which organ is involved.

      The overwhelming consensus among leading psychologists in the modern era is that there are fundamental differences in the natures of gender-typical men and women. It’s important to stress the term ‘gender-typical’ because feminists with mind-numbing frequency point to men and women who act in non-gender-typical ways (women becoming engineers, men becoming nurses…) and would have us believe that in time as many women as men will become engineers, and as many men as women will become nurses. There’s no evidence of such a trend. Women’s progress has largely been in fields to which they are naturally inclined anyway (e.g. medicine), and all too often (as with medicine) the progress can in large measure be attributed to gender equality programmes.

      In claiming that men and women don’t have fundamentally different natures, feminists

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