This rings true: about the difficulties that male politicians have in dealing with Sarah Palin. That combination of being female (as Sarah Palin most certainly is) and a willingness to throw hard and wild rhetorical punches (as Sarah Palin arguably is) makes up something that it’s very difficult for a male politician to try and deal with.

From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin stepped onto the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee, she has been rhetorically body-slamming her Democratic opponents.

She has punched and jabbed and engaged in sarcastic — and sometimes vicious — trash talk. Whether one believes that her behavior is merely par for the course as a campaign comes down to the wire or that her opponents deserve the verbal pummeling or that she has demonstratively gone off the deep end, one thing is clear. Most observers seem to agree that the two men in the line of her fire — Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden — are not allowed to hit her back. Even in today’s post-Hillary Clinton world of presidential politics, boys still aren’t supposed to hit girls. Even if it’s the girl who starts the fight.

It’s as if in politics only half of the changes which have taken place in the rest of society have happened so far. Out in the real world if a woman starts swearing (not that Sarah Palin does that, this is an analogy only) then no man worries too much about swearing back. Similarly, the days of a man never hitting a woman have rather gone: they started to go when women lost their compunction about using violence themselves.

The real test of equality isn’t in the ability of men and women to tell each other how great they are, but in the freedom to express anger, dismay and even disgust — and to do so without fear of repercussions.

That’s still not true in politics, where women still need to be treated as ladies: however unladylike their own behaviour. Maybe the next election, or the one after it, eh?

In fact, I think that might be part of it. That the American electoral cycle only really roars into life once every four years and so the changes in it will always be rather slower than those in the wider society. Simply because it’s only really alive for 6 months out of every 48.

One of those often asked questions is why there aren’t more women in politics. Do the voters discriminate, for example? Do the parties themselves discriminate? Or are there other, simpler, reasons for the lack of women helping to run the country?

It would appear that there are actually.

When women run for office, they win as often as men do.

So, if that is true then the problem must be in the number who put themselves forward to run for office. And that leads us to many of the same asnwers that we find when considering the gender pay gap. Women put themselves forward less often just as they ask for pay rises less often than men. They’re also advised or mentored to do so less often than men.

However, I do think there’s another reason, one that reflects very well upon women. Strip away all that rubbish about helping to run the Republic, wanting to do the best by one’s fellow citizens, and look at what politics actually is. It’s self-aggrandisement, pure and simple. A reach for power over others….and those two are things that men suffer from a great deal more than women do.

As the writer points out, there have been innumerable articles (books even) trying to tell men how to tell if a woman desires them.

I have a feeling that it isn’t the men that buy these books however, rather, it’s the women. To try and find out what men think women do rather than men trying to find out what it is that women do. For, this is clearly and obviously true:

I suppose there might be a few men out there who can’t tell when a woman is into them, but I’ve never met any. In my experience, men always assume women are into them and if not, they assume she must be a lesbian.

Baby brain is real! I never thought I would actually find someone telling us this in public.

Craig Kinsley, professor of neuroscience at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said he believed the same results applied to humans. ‘Pregnant women do undergo a phase of so-called baby brain, when they experience an apparent loss of function,’ he said.

There are those who won’t be all that happy at the idea that pregnant women do indeed suffer some cognitive disruption during the process. Hopwever, it appears that there’s a reason for it too.

‘However, this is because their brains are being remodelled for motherhood to cope with the many new demands they will experience.

‘Many benefits seem to emerge from motherhood, as the maternal brain rises to the reproductive challenge. When the going gets tough, the brain gets going.

‘The changes could last for the rest of their lives, bolstering cognitive abilities and protecting them against degenerative diseases.’

The results of this reprogramming don’t stop there either:

Studies on animals including rats and primates found mothers become much braver, are up to five times faster at finding food and have better spatial awareness than those without offspring.

All part of turning you into “SuperMom” obviously.

This is a very interesting piece about the differences between male and female writers.

The men just think that it’s a matter of typing it out, of getting something down on paper, while the women rather insit upon having something to say, something important to say, something where they have the knowledge about what is going on.

I’d certainly say there’san element of truth in the contention, given that I myself am quite happy to write on anything at all and most of the women writers Iknow will insist on actually knowing about the subject before starting.

Hmm, perhaps that’s not the wisest thing I’ve ever actually admitted in public, is it, you might go back and check my writing!

Anyway, here’s her point:

My caller saw no need for any of this. With the chutzpah of the privileged young male, he believed he could bypass it all and still produce something for which the public would be duly grateful. In fact, there’s only one way of writing a book in these circumstances: you deliver a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do.

I realised that my conversations with aspirant writers, and there have been dozens, had one thing in common: they all involved the male of the species. Africa is full of female reporters who tramp through Darfur’s refugee camps and grit their teeth during Mogadishu firefights. Yet not one of these indomitable females has ever called me for the Quick Guide to Successful African Book Writing. I think I know the reason. It’s the same one that ensured I tried my hand at being an author only after 16 years of journalism. Women probably see an Africa book as featuring Africa first, their own exploits second. They fear they know too little, have nothing original to say. Even in this neo-feminist era, they have a sneaking suspicion they are not worthy.

Now as to the truth in detail of this, rather than it only being her won impression, I’m not sure. But I should point out that the writer is Michela Wrong who has written “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz”, possibly the best book on Equatorial Africa of the last few decades.

I’m pretty sure I also know the name of the male writer she was unhappy with, a certain Tim Butcher, whose much less good book I’ve also read. Still a good book, just much less so than hers and for all the reasons she gives. He goes on an adventure knowing very little about the place whereas she wrote about somewhere she had been reporting from for more than a decade.

The future of work is female that is. OK, so these figures are from the UK and I’d expect the US to be about 10 years ahead of us, as you’ve pretty much always been on social matters.

Statistics compiled by The Sunday Telegraph reveal that women now provide half of recruits and trainees for what were once the traditionally male bastions of medicine, law and the church, while the proportion of women in professions like architecture and veterinary medicine is also rising sharply.

The phenomenon is thought to be the result of girls overtaking boys at school and university, greater expectations among women growing up in the post-feminist age and recruitment practices which encourage and even favour them.

This is something which I’ve touched on before and I think it’s worth reiterating my point again now that it’s becoming more generally acknowledged.

We know that we very much did have, in hte past, direct discrimination against women, in deed, in some countries we still do. For example, it wasn’t all that long ago that women were expected to leave the workforce when they married….certainly when they had children, as is still the caase in Japan today.

We’ve torn down a lot of (most of, all, to your taste) and we now see that college entrance, college degrees awarded and as above, entry into the traditionally high paying professions are now all female majority. About the only area of academia which isn’t female denominated is in the award of higher level degrees.

And yet we still see that women earn less on the dollar than men do: how can we reconcile this absence of discrimination with this outcome? There’s two effects at work here.

The first is that women still do, at least they do a great deal more than men do, drop out of the workforce for some time whilethey have and raise children. They might work part time, or decide not to take promotions, their raises that go with them and also the higher time committment necessary. Not so much a gender pay gap as amotherhood one….but it’s OK, we’ve gone through this enough here not to need to repeat ourselves again at length.

The second reason is I think the still underappreciated one. When we look at the gender pay gap we look at it across all age ranges. That’s what gets us our 79 cents on the $ number, for example. Now, if we did indeed have discrimination in the past and don’t now, then we’d expect that some age group which was discriminated against, would have a lower income, a smaller set of chances, than those now not being discriminated against.

For example, those at the end of their working lives now would have been in their last year or two of high school in 1960. Do we think that there was gender discrimination then in education, in the careers and professional opportunities? Umm, yes, I think we pretty much do think so.

Do we think there still was in 1970? 1980? I’d be surprised if anyone thought that we’d got rid of that “men do these things, women those” before what, say, 1990? So we’re really only seeing the effects of the absence of (this sort of) gender discrimination amongst those who are under about 35 to 40.

Which leads us to an interesting conclusion. OK, we still might want to look at the Mommy discrimination (although since much of it seems to be driven by Mommies’ choices, perhaps we don’t) but it’s certainly possible that direct discrimination is over. Whatever it was that we needed to do we’ve already done. Women are the majority of entrants into these professions now and all we need to do is wait a generation so that they are similarly represented at the top and we’re done.

Which is cheering news, isn’t it? Another problem solved, done and dusted.

Slightly odd question, I know, asking what vegetable are you? And no, this isn’t asked on the basis that you might be as intelligent as an eggplant either. Rather, what body shape do you think you have?

A third of them questioned in a survey admitted that they resembled the purple vegetable – with a belly which bulges beyond their hips and shoulders.

(Aubergine is the English English for an eggplant, just so that you know).

Hmm, 13% of men shaped like carrots? With the classical V shape of a swimmer perhaps? I think we can conclude from that that somewhere near 13% of men are in fact liars: or at best severely deluded. For there’s just about no one, outside the ranks of professional sportsmen, who is actually that sort of shape.

This strikes as being rather more true:

Man boobs were voted the most unattractive male feature by a quarter of those questioned.

Quite so, quite so and:

In another survey, women chose the muffin top, a roll of flesh spilling over the top of the jeans, as the worst feature of the female form.

Yes, I’ve never really forgiven the inventor of hipster jeans for that. Or perhaps I should say the person who made them fashionable. They can indeed look very good on the right figure but on someone of a more normal shape, umm, eek, muffin tops.

However, I have to admit to a certain problem myself…even in a pair on non-hipster jeans I’ve been known to show a certain amount of muffin top myself. Hie me to a gym I think, no?

One of the interesting questions out there is why there are so few women working in the tech world. Most especially we’d like to know why there are so few at the more senior levels.

Now we do have our first order explanation, from our EQSQ personality tests, that there’s a smaller number of women with the right brain type to do tech jobs than there are men. However, the number of women in suh tech jobs is even lower than our own theory would suggest so we do need other, extra, reasons as well.

High-tech women are more likely than men to perceive the workplace as competitive, rather than as a meritocracy, says the study of 1,795 employees at seven Silicon Valley companies, released last week. This belief looms largest during performance reviews, when many women said their managers rewarded competition among co-workers, rather than collaboration.

Women tend more than men to view themselves as “not fitting in” with the company culture, the study says. They believe they’re seen as less technically competent than men, and sometimes come to actually believe that damaging stereotype about themselves. Women are also more likely than men to believe long workdays are required for success; leading those who can’t regularly work late to give up on their careers more readily, the study says.

Also, many more mid-level women than men develop health problems because of work demands, and they make far more family sacrifices, delaying marriage and child-bearing, the study shows. As a result, more mid-level women drop out of the high-tech field, even after investing enormous time and energy into getting started.

All of that makes sense: that it’s womens’ perceptions partly at fault and then we get the inevitable discussion of the Mommy track: something which until we start to reinvent biology we’re not going to solve.

I have to admit though, what really leapt out at me about this piece was this:

workplace as competitive, rather than as a meritocracy,

Eh? A meritocracy is a heirarchy where one gains one’s place upon merit: that is, by being better than those who do not rise in the heirarchy. So, umm, a meritocracy is by its very definition competitive, for that’s what everyone is doing, competing for those higher positions.

So, just why is it that there aren’t more women politicians? Surely half the population should be providing half the politicians?

Well, actually, there might be a fairly simple answer to this.

High-profile candidates such as Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Dole, Kay Hagan and Beverly Perdue are actually exceptions, not the rule. An examination of current officeholders and office seekers reveals that much work is left to do before women achieve equality here.

For example, women hold 22 percent of all elected offices in North Carolina, despite being 54 percent of registered voters. If school board membership is factored out, women hold fewer than 20 percent of all policy-making offices, including the state House and Senate, county board of commissioners and city and town councils.

OK, that’s the situation.

THIS SITUATION IS NOT GOING TO IMPROVE IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE, because relatively few women are becoming candidates for elected office. Since 1992, around 15 percent of all candidates in the state have been women. This year, even with high-profile women at the top of the ballot, only about 16 percent of candidates on the composite North Carolina ballot are women.

Aha! One thing about politics….if you want to get elected you really do rather need to stand, to make yourself available to be elected.

The professor who wrote the article then starts telling us that it’s all down to complex matters, to the traditional caring and nurturing roles of women, to the way in which men have greater belief in their abilities and so on. Personally, I think there’s a much more basic reason.

Political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox demonstrate through their studies that women are only about half as likely as men to express an interest in running for office.

That’s because women are more sensible than men. They know that politics is about puffed up egos more than anything else and it’s a game they just decline to play.

This is a fascinating little study looking at the interaction between AIDS, circumcision and gay men.

We’ve known for some time that for men circumcision can act as a prophylactic against getting HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. One part of the foreskin that is removed contains the islets of Langerhans and we know that this area, being very sensitive, leads to a higher chance of infection if one is having sex with an infected partner.

We also know that such circumcision doesn’t protect the female side of the interaction…well, no more than a lower chance of sleeping with an uninfected male brings, at least.

However, when researchers went and looked at gay men they found something they thought odd. Circumcision seems not to act as a prophylactic for such men at all. Really rather odd and calls into question the Langerhans explanation above. Until, aha:

He suggests that the procedure may be less effective in gays because unlike heterosexual men, they engage in receptive as well as insertive sex.

That’s not really quite true. Some men do indeed only have insertive sex, some only receptive and a third group both. When they looked at the figures again and took account of these distinctions they saw that the insertive only men were indeed protected by circumcision.

So our original theory as to why can still stand.