The latest storm in a teacup to strike the world of science: an essay by some Royal Society dude about men, women and scientific jobs got rejected by the journal Science after earlier getting approval. The essay makes the (hardly new) claim that men and women think in some fundamentally different way, so the dude reckons it was rejected because of politically correct gutlessness. That, of course, is rubbish.

Although the publishers of Science did screw him around, it’s hardly surprising they rejected his work. It’s an intriguing essay, but there’s not much science: where’s the evidence? or potential explanations? or falsifiable hypotheses? He even says it himself — “stereotyping is unscientific”.

How unfortunate that this is only a day after Betty Friedan’s death (which wasn’t that widely reported). Friedan was the first 20th-century writer to seriously put forward the idea (now taken for granted) that a woman’s life can involve things other than popping out children … I suspect she’d have found much to criticise in that essay.