A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in April 2019:

Our thanks to Groan for this. He writes:

Government funded course. Two things occur to me. One is that an awful lot of this stuff is charlatans fleecing public bodies, feedback I had from quite a few of my female former colleagues was that they had a “nice day out” rather than learned much on such “empowering” courses. On the other hand the list of skills and abilities that men must either have in their genes, or learn by doing the job, should make us a much better bet as future managers, certainly much less high maintenance in every way.

As always with Groan, good points, well made. The issue of gender differences in confidence is of enduring interest to me. Why do women need such courses, you might well ask, when men apparently don’t? To me, the answers are obvious:

1. As a sex, women tend to be more anxious than men, more narcissistic, and spend more time and effort managing and exploiting relationships rather than building competences.

2. Only one in seven women is work-centred, while four in seven men are (Dr Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory)

3. From the moment they leave full-time education, women are markedly more likely than men to either not engage in paid employment, or to only work part-time. They therefore spent less time than men in building competences, and to advance they’re more likely than men to leech off those (invariably men) with the competences they lack, as mentees. Men don’t need mentors, thereby proving for literally the gerzillionth time that men are better than women. (We recommend the book, “Men are Better Than Women”, by an American, Dick Masterson. Hilarious.)

4. Building competences is the key to building confidence, for both sexes. Women want confidence without putting in the huge amount of time and effort required to build sufficient competences in advance. As so often the case with women, they want the upside, but not the downside.

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