Whatever happened to merit? Whatever happened to skill, competence and experience? The media today would suggest that these things are quite irrelevant when considering a job application, or a prospective MP, or an appointment to a quango. No, all that matters now is what your gender is, or the colour of your skin, so said organisation can boost its ‘diversity’ numbers.

The great Heather Mac Donald warns us: ‘If the #MeToo movement only reduces sexual predation in the workplace, it will have been a force for good. Its most likely result, however, will be to unleash a torrent of new gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, on the theory that disparities in representation and employment are due to harassment and bias.’

This has been my concern too. Every single #MeToo story, any story that features a wronged woman, has been immediately leveraged to push the narrative that identity trumps merit. This is where feminism has morphed into a war on meritocracy and is why I am off the train.

Once upon a time, feminism was about liberty for the individual. Now it aims for parity for the group. Feminism was about liberating women so they could to enter the public sphere as they saw fit.

The public sphere and who does what and at what level was decided by merit – how good you were at your job. Now the feminists have launched a war on merit and the public sphere itself. Reforms such as maternity leave can be justified as they do not target the very essence of what merit is – it can facilitate keeping the best candidate in the job.

However, the destruction of the public sphere continues because of the overwhelming focus being not on whether someone is the best candidate for the job, but instead on whether they have a vagina or not (or whether they want to get rid of the vagina). This feminism is demeaning, dehumanising and dangerous.

This war on the meritocracy dominates and the feminists who now control the mainstream media have been pushing us so far down the rabbit hole it is hard to find our way out.

After 50 years of feminism they are still astounded to see there is a pay difference on very simplistic comparisons between men and women. This is evidence of discrimination, shout the feminists. No it isn’t – it is evidence of liberty, of difference and the fact that women make different choices.

They cannot even figure out basic economics as demonstrated by the Tesco case. In it, store workers (most of whom are women) claim they are being penalised because their pay is £8 per hour compared with distribution workers (mostly male) who receive £11. We are not to ask why men and women have randomly sorted themselves into these categories, although a minority of women will work in the distribution centres etc. Nor are we to ask why the women don’t just apply to work at the distribution centre with greater pay.

No, instead, teams of ‘experts’ and lawyers will say the work is of the same value. Perhaps, but the conditions are not the same – the distribution store being colder, less safe, and harder to travel to.

So, we will have wage control essentially – the store assistants will have their pay raised artificially and the cost will either be passed on to the customer or the shareholder. This is how modern feminism works: price and wage control. Meddling in the market. Power, power and more power. That’s what they want in order to force everyone to make the choices they want, or to compensate for the fact that men and women make different choices.

Now, they want to interfere in hiring decisions. There will be shed loads of quotas, diversity administrators, diversity training, quota administrators and enforcers forcing companies to take on people they would not otherwise hire. Feminists are forcing companies to set salaries that do not reflect the value of the job. And then when that company slashes jobs or increase prices, the feminists will crow on about the ‘cost of living crisis’.

This is poisonous to those women who are hired on merit – they are just lumped into the ‘quota ladies’ that we will all soon be able to identify easily enough. The cost to the business and economy as a whole (paying over the odds for a less skilled candidate) I call the feminism fee, and we will all have to pay it.

It should be a fundamental truth that neither governments nor employers should discriminate on the basis of gender. The diversity dogma puts a torch to this idea so that feminists can have narcissistic pleasure when meddling in commerce, or the economy and democracy itself.

You can identify these feminists by the smug look on their faces, glowing with the virtue of their good intentions and careless of the havoc they wreak on the rest of us.

In April, courtesy of a Conservative government, larger businesses will be forced to reveal their pay gap statistics. Again this will be leveraged to tell us all how downtrodden our womenfolk are and not that the gap is a product of free choice. Everyone outside the M25, the cognoscenti, knows this. Not that you could tell from listening to the BBC.