Mark Brooks, the estimable chairman of Mankind Initiative, will tomorrow morning be giving evidence to a Welsh Assembly inquiry on the Gender-based Violence, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Bill. The charity’s written submission to the inquiry is here, he’ll be speaking in the 10:55 – 11:30 session. We wish him every success.

A remarkably well-researched and powerful open letter to Nicky Morgan, Education Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities.

In the course of a very enjoyable lunch on Sunday with a number of people interested in men’s and boys’ human rights, I happened to mention the issue of men paying 72% of the income tax collected by the government, while women pay just 28%. One of the assembled – a professor in a scientific discipline – commented:

Ah, yes – the gender tax gap!

This insight started me thinking about ‘gender gaps’, given that feminists trot out some ridiculous ones supposedly reflecting disadvantages faced by women, such as their analysis of the ‘gender pay gap’. We’ve now reached a total of 20 topics in our election manifesto – there may be more to come – and all of them could reasonably be described as gender gaps:

1. Abortion
2. Genital mutilation
3. Access to parents following family breakdowns
4. Education
5. Employment
6. Income tax
7. Access to children
8. Physical abuse
9. Sexual abuse
10. Suicide
11. Homelessness
12. Criminal justice system bias
13. Reproductive rights
14. Paternity fraud
15. Anonymity for those suspected of having committed sexual offences
16. Financial settlements following divorce
17. Health
18. Political representation
19. Government interference in company director appointments
20. Retirement years expectation

For the avoidance of doubt, we include abortion as a ‘gender gap’ issue because women alone have the legal power to decide on an abortion. We’re not calling for men to have any such rights, but we will be making proposals for abortion law reform in our manifesto, which we now hope to publish before the end of October.

[The programme will be available on iPlayer here until 27.10.14. We hope to post it to our YT channel in the next two or three days.]

An interesting programme, although its feminist bias was apparent within a few minutes, with a statement from Alice Roberts along the lines of ‘Women earn 20% less than their male colleagues’. A clear statement of the gender pay gap myth, with a subtle twist – ‘their male colleagues’ implies an equivalence in the work being done, whether in terms of choice of profession, or seniority. Outrageous. Of course we know that when we account for these factors, the ‘gap’ disappears.

One of the more interesting sections in the programme concerned a study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania – or was it Philadelphia? – showing that major gender-typical brain ‘wiring’ differences emerge in the teenage years. This was attributed to social conditioning for no apparent reason, and the idea that this might be an innate biological process unconnected with social conditioning not even out forward as a possibility. At the end of the section Alice Roberts said something along the lines of:

This study has been heavily criticised.

… and then moved swiftly on. We weren’t informed who’d criticised the study, nor on what grounds, nor how well qualified (if at all) they were to criticise it. But those few words were enough to discredit the research.

Prof Simon Baron-Cohen has demonstrated that gender-typical differences in what newborn babies find interesting – males are more interested in mechanical objects, females more interested in faces – long before exposure to social conditioning. This well-known research cannot have escaped the attention of the programme’s researchers. But how did the programme present the issue of gender preferences for toys? By seeing what happened when they left toy trucks and dolls in Woburn Safari Park, and noted the strong gender preferences of monkeys. Many viewers would reasonably have thought, ‘Well, that may be true for monkeys, but it may not be true for humans.’ And that’s precisely what the piece was designed to do.

The ending of the programme was, with the benefit of hindsight, predictable. Michael Mosley all but accepted the ‘nurture’ explanation about differences in the natures of men and women. A good opportunity squandered.

One of the books which made a big impact on me a few years ago was The Essential Difference, a book written by a world-renowned Cambridge-based psychologist, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, and published in 2003. So I was pleased to learn that on BBC2 at 9pm tonight there’s going to be a Horizon programme purporting to explore the question, ‘Is your brain male or female?’

The cases for and against gendered brain differences being both significant and the basis of some key differences between the behaviours of men and women is overwhelming as a recent book by an unfortunately-named Dutch scientist, Dick Swaab, reveals.

In the Horizon programme the case for some gender-typical behaviour differences being at least partly attributable to brain differences will be put by Michael Mosley, the opposing case by a feminist, Alice Roberts. My strong expectation is – given this is a BBC programme – Roberts and other like-minded people will be given substantially more airtime than Michael Mosley and others in his camp. But hope springs eternal.

A piece written for the BBC website by Michael Mosley is here. I see that in this piece Mosley is described as ‘Dr’ and Roberts a ‘Professor’. The BBC couldn’t have chosen a male professor alongside a female doctor to present a programme on gendered brain differences, could it?

An interesting new piece from Glen Poole. Not too impressed with the content behind reason #1, which is basically about redefining masculinity and femininity – to my mind, a distinctly Leftie concept – but otherwise there’s little to quibble about.

Disgraceful. We’ll have a lot to say about the gender justice gap in our election manifesto.

An interesting piece followed by an insightful comment from Angry Harry.

Michael Gove, one of the few conviction politicians in the cabinet, was recently replaced as Education Secretary by Nicky Morgan, Minister for Women and Equalities. We shouldn’t be too surprised, then, by this. Be sure to open the link in the first line.

AVfM have posted this, a lengthy piece at 2:10:24. It has to be said A/V issues were a problem at the start of this session, at least at the beginning, but we’re confident the A/V will run smoothly at the 2015 conference. It would be fair to say most of the panellists were exhausted – although upbeat – at the end of the conference. I’m informed I made a contribution at 53:00 – 54:04, and possibly later.