back and forth across the atlantic.

In the eyes of those who subscribe to the biological determinism, there is a good fit between the world as it is today and the innate aptitudes of men and women.

There is no dissatisfaction,
there is no frustration,
there is no misfiring between our desires and our situations.

Every aspect of inequality that we see today can be explained by the different genetic and hormonal make-up of men and women;

if women earn less,
if men have more power,
if women do more domestic work,
if mean have more status,

then this is simply the way that things are meant to be.

In this way the biological determinism of the twenty-first century works in the same way as the biological determinism of the nineteenth century, which told women who sought change that they were entirely unsuited to higher education or physical exertion. In Victorian Britain dissent was nevertheless voiced by a small but determined minority, which created real social change for women that proved the fatalists wrong.

If we are to move forward towards greater freedom and equality in this generation, we would need to overcome the influences of thee stereotypes, which currently affect our expectations of our children and our expectations of our partners and ourselves.

We would need to ask again why it is that we are allowing the stereotypes of the nurturing, empathetic woman and powerful, logical man to be seen as natural and inevitable and look instead at how these assumptions have been constructed, how they are maintained and how they can be challenged.