Natasha Walter

This idea that the growth of glamour modelling and its effect on women’s ambitions is all down to the operation of free choice seems to have silenced many potential critics.

this is the new sexual liberation, it looks too uncannily like the old sexism to convince many of us that this is the freedom we have sought.

consider the findings to be evidence that people do not accurately perceive their own behaviour, but instead assume it to be in accordance with established norms and expectations.’

the group who had been primed to believe that the sexes were unequal in their attainment, women did worse than the men. In the group told that women and men had performed equally in the past, the sex difference in attainment was eliminated.

woman who works full-time does an average of twenty-three hours of domestic work a week; a man who works full-time does an average of eight hours of domestic work each week.

What women who seek power gain in authority, they will lose in femininity, and vice versa.

‘Men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not. They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum.’

men’s involvement in infant care positively correlated with their satisfaction with family life and adjustment to fatherhood; and that ‘when men do almost as much child care as their wives their psychological well-being soars’.

men were expected to take at least six months at home with the birth of each baby, and were frowned on if they worked full-time before their child was twelve, and were judged by other fathers if they didn’t bring cakes to the school cake sale, and never opened a newspaper without finding that the decision to work and be a father was under question; if they had to hassle and negotiate for every hour they spent away from their newborn baby, if the childcare costs were seen as coming out of their salary not their wife’s, if their partner was not prepared to take up all the slack; if they lived, in other words, in the same world that women do, then their choices might look different.