The biological truth: it really is a man’s world

Why do so few women attain positions of power? The answer, discovers rosie boycott, goes all the way back to the womb

When I first became a feminist, I thought that men and the male-way were the gold standard. Not men per se, but the way they lived their lives. In other words, the way they were free to pursue intellectual goals, to work, to succeed, above all to be leaders of the world.

I believed, along with everyone else, that women, deep down or not so deep down, wanted to do all that as well. We were only prevented from doing it because men, and the sexist world they created, prevented us - they kept us out because their power base was threatened.

I remember writing in early editions of Spare Rib that it was 'only a question of time' before women scaled the ladder of economic success and power and took their place alongside men in the boardroom. And indeed, women

did zoom into education and outshone the boys. They began getting more places in university and better grades. In their early twenties, recent reports show, women are actually out-earning men in many instances.

So it is clearly not a problem with brains and ability that continues to keep women out of boardrooms. Something else is going on, and it is this that Susan Pinker has so elegantly described in her book, The Sexual Paradox. She has, in fact, proved that women are indeed different from men right from the womb, when they are pumped full of different hormones. Women by nature do not want to be manic, one-dimensional work-horses who invest all their energies in one thing: their job (or sometimes their hobby).

The trouble is that that the world is still organised according to a gold standard devised by men. While society continues primarily to value the skills that make shedloads of money, then the skills women have will always be seen as second rate - and women will be seen to be failing because they aren't behaving like men.