Caroline Lucas has had to retract a suggestion she had floated of an all women cabinet to somehow seize power and solve the Brexit problem. She wrote in the Guardian (where else?) “Why women? Because I believe women have shown they can bring a different perspective to crises, are able to reach out to those they disagree with and cooperate to find solutions.”

She had to retract this (12.08.19) not because of this blatant gender discrimination, but because there wasn’t a single BAME woman on the list, and the usual suspects (someone with the initial ‘DA’ for example) raised voices to point this out. She apologised for including only white women in her proposed female anti-Brexit cabinet, saying she should have “reached out further and thought more deeply”.

Note the state to which we have arrived. It’s ok to suggest that a group of women can solve problems , and it IS ok to exclude men on the basis of some purely gender based shortcoming.. That doesn’t seem to be very representative at all.

The key issue here is that Lucas used logic which differentiates between the sexes on the basis that one gender has materially different genetic characteristics in behavioural attitudes (and hence capabilities) to the other, to the extent that one gender should be excluded from consideration where those characteristics are required for some task. I.e., gender discrimination is fine – as long as it is men that are being excluded.

Or does that give the green light to an employer who thinks women are not suited to a particular task in his company the right to exclude them from consideration ? Such an employer may well be faced with the situation Lucas was in a while ago, being strong armed by Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

The fact is that women, exercising their seeming right to be illogical and scatty, are happy to bear down (if the expression can be excused) on men who even stray towards a misogynist bent, whilst exhibiting an overt misandry towards men.

This asymmetry in approach needs to be contained (a topic on which Grumpy has opined before, citing Yvette Cooper), but maybe the fact that the Cabinet Office doesn’t have the facilities to enable them all to go to the toilet together (a uniquely female trait in Grumpy’s experience) may rein in her future would-be Cabinet make up.