mary kenny: men are from mars, women.. are horses

A few minor notes to add to the growing body of fisk surrounding Mary Kenny's piece in The Telegraph entitled "It's against women's nature to want to lead." Oh, my.

My stand-out favourite part is where Kenny argues that women don't want to be leaders because they are predisposed to caring. Because "caring" is diametrically opposed to "leading":

[The fact that some women want to be mothers] is also, to some extent, a reversion to what Nature regards as normality. Perhaps it is what Nature has encoded into the DNA of most women – that the female instinct is towards the maternal vocation, although that maternal instinct can be expressed in a wide number of ways, from animal welfare to teaching to medical care to nurturing a corporation.

Uh.. what now... nurturing a corporation? That sounds suspiciously like leadership, even if it's dressed up to sound like a woman is breast-feeding the staff of a Fortune 500 company. It's also lovely that Kenny was able to find out exactly what Nature wants: it's an interview I look forward to reading.

I also like how it's "most" women - which allows for the occasional genetic aberration of free will. Even so, Kenny does her every best to avoid recognising that women might be different from each other and lead different lives - and that the "choices" available when it comes to working and/or raising children are definitively not the same for everyone.

To finish, there's nothing like a parable based on a horse, because if there's one thing we know about women it's that they are.. like horses. Hmm:

I met a racing expert recently who told me about a gifted filly in which he had an interest. She was a fine goer, but as soon as she pulled ahead of the field she would suddenly get second thoughts and fall back with the herd.

She didn't want to lead: it went against her nature. If women pull back from the hard world [herd world, shurely?] of career competition it is because we are, in the end, often restrained by our nature: and maybe the rising generation is wisely deciding to go with the flow.

And it's also very hard to type or take minutes if you have hooves for hands - though the clear advantage is that you only have to pay women in sugar lumps.

(h/t to Dave Hill).