The truth about men and women may be too hot to handle.

I wrote this article today in response to an opinion piece in the Sunday Times.

Andrew Sullivan may be right, the truth about men and women may be too hot to handle.

I understand by his comments that Mr. Sullivan is not a scientist. Mr Sullivan’s nodding in agreement with Harvard president and chief blunderer Larry Summers’ as he raises the possibility that male preponderance at the very top of research science might have something to do with genetics – based on research results showing men were disproportionately represented at the very bottom and the very top of the table of science tests – betrays both Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Summers’ lack of scientific understanding and glaringly reveals their poorly hidden bigotry.

First of all, all the cited research study showed was a gender difference, not a genetic difference. To a scientist, these are completely different things. Genetics is simply one factor in a grand array of cultural, social and aptitudinal differences that emerge between men and women. The cultural conditioning and belief in what and how one “should” be as a boy or girl are introduced to babies at a very early age and reinforced by countless social cues throughout life. The presupposition that women are therefore incapable of reaching the “top” of anything because of their genetics is as absurd an assertion as saying that black men are incapable of great achievements because of their genetics. You do think THAT statement absurd, don’t you Mr. Sullivan? Not to mention that the definition of “top” and the value of achieving it in the first place I would assert are generally measures devised by men, not women, in positions of power.

The reaction of Professor Nancy Hopkins – “this kind of bias makes me physically ill” – is simple to explain: by now we can smell a chauvinist at 20 miles.

Women were kept out of top orchestras for eons on the belief that they couldn’t “handle” the physical strain of high level performance. It wasn’t until the practice of blind auditions was introduced that women were able to enter the male orchestra kingdom.

As another example, the professional organization for film directors in the US, the Directors Guild, is currently only 4% women. Are women genetically unable to tell good stories on film? Surely even a non-scientist can see the absurdity of that.

The only reason I didn’t seriously consider directing as a career until recently was that I didn’t SEE any women directors around. Subconsciously, I didn’t think it was possible. So I became a scientist, and a writer. Well, of course it was possible. Now I am a director, despite lack of role models.

That’s not to say I don’t see differences between men and women. These, however, are the ones you might find too hot to handle….

Since we have been graphically reminded this week, it is men who conjured up, designed and built the facilities for, and carried out the Holocaust, as well as every other genocide we’ve experienced.

It is men who divvied up the Middle East into arbitrary regions without regard for existing tribal affinities, which is at the bottom of the current disastrous continuous conflicts there which continue to threaten our world.

It is men who have been intransigent on both sides of the Israel – Arab conflict, refusing to see how they might live together on the same inhospitable spit of sand.

It is men who organized the original Crusades, men who organized the Inquisition, men who decided slavery was alright.

It is men who designed the burka and who undertake honour killings of “impure” women in many cultures, men who decided that such honour killings are misdemeanours.

Come to think of it, it is men who brought us every war known to this planet. Women – half of the planet – according to esteemed military historian John Keegan, have always and everywhere stood apart. With the rarest of exceptions, women don’t fight.

From such evidence, one can conclude that men are bad for humanity.

It is the spirit of cooperation, not confrontation that makes the world go around. Men, whether for genetic reasons or current gender upbringing, are notoriously confrontational. Surely I don’t need to show you crime data for you to accept that, Mr. Sullivan.

But that’s not all. Men brought us the industrial revolution, and concurrent belief that we could conquer our environment. The result of this path is that we are 10 years or less away from tipping the planet toward unstoppable global warming, a temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous change. That means widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests – with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream, according to a major scientific report released this week.

It is easy to conclude from such evidence, that men are bad for the planet.

This grand, prolonged experiment now concludes. Perhaps women were curious to see what would happen to the planet if you took over for a while. The results are in.

Now there’s no time. These are our children you are threatening and their future on this planet. Time for men to get out of the way. Women have a lot of work to do.