As if we women didn't have ample proof that men are a different species, science is now backing us up.
According to a study published in the journal Nature last week, the battle of the sexes, or at least the sex chromosomes, has been won. After a 300 million-year struggle for supremacy between the Y male chromosome and the X chromosome, the female sex chromosome has been declared the victor. Sorry boys, but you can't argue with science.
It seems the Y chromosome has been shedding genes for millions of years and is a pathetic shadow of its former self. This means that males effectively have only 45 chromosomes to do their work, the 46th being the rather limp and inferior Y chromosome. Women on the other hand have the full complement, our 46th being the second more muscular X chromosome, which turns out not to be a spare back-up, as scientists once thought, but a whole other programme.
Apparently, this makes us womenfolk infinitely more complex, more variable and according to one of the authors of the study, Duke University genome expert Professor Huntington Willard, more interesting creatures by far than our rather simpler male counterparts.
Women are not only more different from men than previously thought, but also more different from each other.
Which explains why men through the ages have struggled to understand the female mind. It's clearly beyond them.
The wonder is that we manage to cohabit at all. A friend of mine who once counselled married couples has lost count of the number of times that men cried on her shoulder after a break-up that had come as a complete shock to them.
Unlike the women, they'd had no idea there was anything wrong with their marriage - an observation backed up by a just released Australian study which finds that, in the year before a divorce, as many as 55 per cent of men surveyed rated their satisfaction with their marriage as 8 out of 10 or more.
Really, it's difficult to find any good news for men these days. Some scientists even predict that the Y chromosome's diminution could see the disappearance of men altogether another 10 million years from now, if not much sooner.
Which would be a pity, really; I've always quite liked men, especially since I'm raising two myself, albeit with increasing trepidation.
I don't need studies to tell me they're different. My boys arrived noisier, more demanding and energetic than my girl. They can be smelly creatures, whose telephone conversations seem to consist largely of grunts, who have no compunction about handing in sloppy school work, and whose reading tastes run to non-fiction, or books with titles such as The Day My Bum Went Psycho and Captain Underpants.
Still, I'd never seen these differences as a disadvantage. Frankly, I'd been more worried about ensuring that my daughter didn't limit her horizons. But everywhere I look now the evidence suggests that it's the boys I'm supposed to be worrying about.
It comes as a surprise to those of us still struggling with pay equity, and the unequal division of housework and childcare responsibilities, to find that, apparently, it's not a man's world after all.
Even as another International Women's Day passes, with the United Nations reminding us that women are still second-class citizens in much of the world, we're being asked to see men as the fragile beings, and boys, not girls, as the ones in crisis. Ironically, half the world is trying to liberate women, and the other half - that one that started telling girls 30 years ago that they could do anything - is wringing its hands over the trouble with boys.
Barely a week goes by without another example of the supposed disadvantages being suffered by boys. Only this week, a Rotorua charity that hands out scholarships, two-thirds of them this year to girls, was being accused of a bias against boys. Though I'm not sure why since two-thirds of the applications it receives are from girls.
Still, there's no denying the problem, or the need for urgent action.
Some schools have caught on to the idea that they need to teach boys differently. One co-ed Wellington high school I know has segregated some of its boys into another class. Similar moves in Britain, where some schools have experimented with new teaching styles catering for the restless energy and shorter attention spans of testosterone-charged boys, are having similar successes.
Doing something about the social changes, which child psychologists say have been particularly bad for boys, will be more challenging.
I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, promoted by some male advocates, that we've become an anti-male society, but there's no doubt that more boys are growing up without fathers, are going to schools with fewer male teachers, and are less likely to be raised in the kinds of families and communities where they have access to older male figures to help them through the difficult transition to manhood.
This trend to ever more isolated nuclear families has been blamed by child psychologists for depriving children of the kinds of inter-relational experiences necessary to develop the empathy they need for healthy relationships and keep them out of trouble. It might also explain why a recent survey found an alarming majority of youth offenders felt no remorse for their crimes.
All of which seems to be about accepting, finally, that we are indeed different and ought to be treated as such.
<EM>Tapu Misa:</EM> Now we know for sure that boys and girls are different
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