Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy. (Henry Kissinger)

So the news was dominated today with reports that sexism is rife in our workplace and that Hilary Clinton will not become the first female President of the US of A because of sexism. Yes, cracks have been made in the glass ceiling, but it’s still hanging on for dear life at the law firms apparently, as the vigilant Margaret Thornton reported today on ABC Radio National’s very excellent “The Law Report”.

Margaret Thornton was annoyed, and so she should be, it’s intolerable that anyone these days is kept back, or to be more precise, not advanced on the basis of anything other than merit. My problem is that such outrage seems to be a one-way street in that it only seems to be a problem if it is targeted at a minority group or women. Let me explain:

For quite a while now Australia (and other western democracies) have adopted a policy of what is called in PC circles “positive discrimination” or “affirmative action”. What this basically means is that corporations and various government departments are given a percentage target of a given demographic that must be met by a certain timeframe.

For example “The Greens” (a major political party in Australia) state that they are: “Remedying existing discrimination by ensuring a higher representation of women on legislative and judicial bodies.” Of course, there’s an elephant in the room when we get down to actually enacting this type of mandate; that is, how do you remedy the existing discrimination without hiring purely on the basis of gender or race?

The short answer is that you can’t. There is no such thing as “positive discrimination”, just discrimination. Whenever you discriminate, someone is unfairly advantaged, and someone is unfairly disadvantaged. The only arguments that can be made in favour of such legislation usually end up along the lines of “The end justifies the means”. Basically, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Insurance companies also seem to have hitched a ride on the bandwagon, and SGIO have an advertising campaign at the moment which states that “SGIO rewards women for their safer driving by offering them a lower premium”. This can be restated to “SGIO punishes men by offering them a higher premium”, thereby implying that the driving standard of every male is automatically in question because of their gender. Nice.

Moving on to Hilary Clinton, I heard a breathless female reporter today announce that “The country was ready for a female President, but the media was not”, and she went on to say that Hillary’s chances were harmed by sexist comments made by various media personalities. To my mind this argument is self-defeating. The two possibilities are:

1. The country was ready for a female President. In this case they would have dismissed such sexist comments and just condemned the media reporter who made them. Or;

2. The country wasn’t ready for a female President, and wrongly took the sexist comments to heart and voted accordingly.

You can’t have it both ways.