Cambridge University examiners have been told to avoid using words like “brilliant”, “flair” and “genius” because they are associated with the male sex. Is Dr Lucy Delap, the advocate of these policies, suggesting that that using these words in the presence of women is like talking about hillwalking to someone in a wheelchair? It sounds like it. If feminists carry on like this, “reason”, “logic”, “intelligence” and “rationality” will also have to go.

The reason for all this is because at Cambridge men get more firsts than women. At Oxford, where they have the same problem, they are letting students do their exam papers at home in an effort to get women’s grades up. The lengths feminists will go to correct spurious corners of female inequality is extraordinary when one thinks how men are falling so dramatically behind. Males fall behind women through the rest of the education system, resulting in 35 per cent fewer of them getting degrees. But nothing, absolutely nothing is done to correct the disadvantages facing men.

Explanations to deal with pockets where men do better than women come under the rubric of “unconscious bias”. This is a dubious theory where the unconsciousness of the bias cannot be established, nor can its link with behaviour be proved. This has never stopped feminists. In fact $8 billion is spent by US corporations every year on diversity training programmes when the most comprehensive review of 1,000 studies on the effectiveness of this training concludes that there is “a dearth of evidence” as to whether they actually work.

There is a much more simple explanation why in Cambridge there is a surfeit of clever men. First, although on average men and women are equally intelligent there are different patterns of distribution of cognitive ability between women and men. Women are a lot less likely to be among the least intelligent. They are also much less likely to be among the most intelligent. So if you are talking about 5 or 10 per cent of the most intelligent people in a society – you will always have a surfeit of men.

This is not a one-off finding but has been found repeatedly. And the sample sizes are not small but run into hundreds of thousands of cases – one study, looking specifically at mathematics, had over a million individuals. It is referred to as the “high achievers male advantage gap”. It helps to explain why in the most selective educational environments there will be a predominance of males. As the best performing children are more likely to end up in successful careers, one would expect there to be an overrepresentation of males in high status careers based on performance data alone.

While the overall pattern is true, there is a great deal of variation between different cultures so feminists can correctly point to the influence of nurture. But if they are looking for comfort – they really won’t find any crumbs. Boys are more likely to outperform girls in overall PISA scores (Programme for International Student Assessment) in countries with high levels of gender equality. If they want to find girls outperforming – it is the patriarchal countries with Sharia law which they have to turn to. In the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan the girls do much better than the boys.

In the recent election, the feminists’ party, the WEP, made it absolutely clear that the new goal posts are equality of outcome. Sophie Walker believed that she was portraying Philip Davies as sexist when she pointed out that, “Philip Davies is a proponent of the idea that you can achieve equality by treating everybody equally.” And “Equality under the law is mistaken for equality”, their founder Catherine Mayer declared.

The biggest problem with equality of outcome is that it rides roughshod over our natural abilities and preferences and the choices which we make on the bases of the experiences we have. In doing so it tries to shoehorn reality into the shape of feminist ideology.

But with equality of outcome, feminism hasn’t done its worst.

We currently have a situation in academia where not only is there no real world hiring data showing a bias against hiring women, the data suggests that women are more likely to be chosen at all stages of the selection process than men.

However, for feminists, evidence of female advantage is not incompatible with inherent biases against women. In fact, for feminists women would do better still if only the biases were not there. So when men do better than women this is because women are discriminated against, but when women do better than men this is because they are more brilliant. And if it weren’t for gender bias there would be a lot more women there.

This is explained, and plenty of evidence provided, by Ceci et. al., the paper on which these arguments are based: “Thus, the argument is that if the pool of female applicants is of higher quality than the male pool, then the high proportion of female PhDs hired may mask bias that prevented an even higher proportion from being hired”.

And this is the real problem with feminism. It has no real interest in equality. It is an ideology of female superiority. Equality is a mere stepping stone to female domination. And the rest of the world had better conform.

Evidence for some of these arguments can be found in:

Ceci, S.J., Ginther, D.K., Kahn, S. and Williams, W.M., 2014. Women in academic science A changing landscape. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 15(3), pp.75-141.

Stoet, G. and Geary, D.C., 2015. Sex differences in academic achievement are not related to political, economic, or social equality. Intelligence, 48, pp.137-151.

(Image: Guido van Nispen)