I like to think I've been pretty quiet about it, but all things being equal, I shall soon be in possession of a baby, whose gender I yet know not. "Why didn't you find out?" people ask, and then, "But what colour are you going to paint your nursery?"

Ah, the pink/blue conundrum. Over my dead body would a daughter of mine be put in a pink nursery; unless, of course, she looks like a boy, and I need to distinguish her in some way, otherwise she'll pick up pre-linguistically on how discomfited I am by the boy-girl issue and her gender-confidence will be negatively affected in later life. If that's the case, she will be dressed in wall-to-wall pink until such time as she is old enough to assert her femininity herself, in some new, 21st-century way. Social conditioning is tenacious because it is so convenient. Like air travel, it is much easier to rail against than to eschew.

Apparently, though, this is nothing to do with social conditioning. Anya Hurlbert, professor of visual neuroscience at Newcastle University, has just published research showing that there is "biological and not simply cultural substance to the old saying: pink for a girl and blue for a boy". There are two spectra: red-greenness and blue-yellowness. While men chose their favourite tones across both, women preferred the red end of the red-green axis. Hurlbert concluded that: "The differences were so substantial that seasoned researchers using the data are usually able to predict the sex of a participant by checking their favourite colour." It all makes sense, apparently, because a clear blue sky indicated good hunting weather, where red sometimes means a fruit is ripe. Wow.

Here's what I want to know: when are we going to stop this idiocy? When are at least the decent universities - like, for instance, Newcastle - going to introduce some kind of cost-benefit analysis into their research programmes? How much will this knowledge benefit humanity, and at what cost to our academic credibility? I only ask because it seems to be taking such a long time.

In the 1960s, there was a vogue in British academia for investigating which race was the most intelligent. Hans Eysenck, at its vanguard, decided that the Chinese were the most intelligent, and black people the least; Caucasians, I believe, occupied some space just below the Chinese. These results have been contested ever since; almost the whole of the 1970s was spent contesting them, the most compelling case against being that the IQ tests upon which the evidence was based were culturally biased. As an alternative, Raven's Progressive Matrices (or Raven's test) were introduced to reduce bias, and what-ho, black people were found not to be less intelligent than white ones, after all.

Raven's test is still used in prisons, incidentally, but every other part of this enquiry has been pretty much abandoned, on the grounds of total pointlessness. What on earth could be the point of devising a test, then checking a number of races against the test, finding one superior, and then tangling up better minds than your own in the explanation of why that test was incomplete? It's nothing more than a rather convoluted form of proving that English people are the best at speaking English.

And what, likewise, is the point of proving that women prefer pink for biological reasons? Where does that leave us? In whose crazy imagination are we just about to return to a state of Neanderthalism where that information will come in handy? Whose interests does it serve, to invest time-consuming enquiry into nailing down these trivial differences? This concentration on innate biological difference between (let's be frank) oppressor and oppressed is so discredited in the racial arena, it's functionally an academic taboo. How did we never manage to discredit the same impulse in the business of gender? Were we distracted by strawberries?

mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk