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Mr Evans is right about women MPs
In their rush to promote women, party bosses scrape the barrel
It is one of those depressing facts of life that the wrong people are often right. David Evans, the Conservative MP usually described as "colourful" (newspaper code for truly appalling), is quite obviously rather a wrong person. But in his attack last week on everyone from a black rapist (needs castrating) to Virginia Bottomley (dead from the neck up), he was right at least in saying that most women in the House of Commons are ordinary. That is putting it kindly. There are hardly any women MPs of any distinction at all, largely, I imagine, because women of distinction wish to avoid any risk of associating with "colourful" people like David Evans, and seek other employment. If most of the women at Westminster are distinctly unimpressive, one can at least say that the women's movement has not struggled in vain; in this field at least women have achieved equality with the men in the Commons, who are mostly equally uninspiring. I must confess that I have also thought, like David Evans, that some of the women in authority in Parliament, and some of those in shadow-authority, are not just ordinary but dreadful too. Presumably as there are so few female politicians, the party bosses are forced, in their rush for women to promote, to scrape the barrel. They are driven to elevate women every bit as ignorant and irrational as most of the men, and the result is what we see today, and possibly even more clearly after May. There is no point in campaigning for more women in Parliament, or in including them artificially in constituencies. There are all kinds of reasons why women avoid certain jobs, or fail to excel in them, or excel in others; the desire to avoid David Evans is only one explanation among many. Another explanation is that women's minds tend to be innately different from men's. I am not sure whether this thought is still unmentionable in feminist circles, despite all the scientific evidence that men and women are generally speaking wired-up differently. Men and women tend to have different aptitudes. It is also true that in terms of standard intelligence tests, women cluster round the norm whereas men are over-represented at the extremes. That is, there are more men than women of very low IQ and of very high IQ. Some interesting differences have emerged very recently. Last week a neurologist at Sydney University reported findings that the areas of the brain which are associated with language are larger in women than in men; this may partly explain why women are more fluent speakers and have better verbal memories than men. It is now generally accepted that women have better aptitudes for language and social skills than men, more complex connections between the two sides of the brain and lesser aptitudes for spatial, three-dimensional thinking. Neurology is full of studies suggesting gender-based differences in the mind; there is even research from the United States that suggests that the brains of homosexuals are in some respects more like women's than like heterosexual men's. All this research is in its infancy, but there now seems little doubt that brain and gender are closely linked. It is unusual for women to be outstandingly good at maths, and even more so at physics. Women composers are rare, so are first-rate women chess players and architects, and while it is true that for centuries women were denied the opportunity to try these things - even very gifted women who had, against all the odds, demonstrated their exceptional ability - they are now no longer prevented from competing in these fields. Yet they remain slow to excel in any numbers. The truth is that most women are good "at other things", as people always used to say before it became unthinkable. It is also true, and more or less acceptable, to say that most women are interested in different things from most men. We should immediately abandon the idea that women ought to be equally represented in all occupations, and the underlying idea that if women are not equally represented in numbers, the only possible explanation must be their unfair discrimination. The truth is that there are probably many fewer women than men with the high level of specialised intelligence needed for the wilder shores of physics. So what? There is more to life than quarks. For that matter there is a great deal more to life than late-night sittings in the House of Commons. Equal opportunity, not equal representation, is all that any reasonable woman can hope for.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, March 09, 1997
