The Miseducation Of Women by James Tooley

A (male) academic argues that girls should be allowed to embrace a domestic destiny. Anne Phillips begs to differ

James Tooley's book falls within a recognisable genre of "backlash" literature. He opens with the unhappiness of women who devoted their twenties to the delights of being single and the pursuit of a career, only to find in their thirties and forties that husband and children have escaped them. Bridget Jones figures large here.

Enlisting en route such unlikely allies as Simone de Beauvoir to testify to women's yearning for domestic fulfilment, Tooley trips through the hunter-gatherer societies of the Pleistocene period to establish the essential differences between women and men. The feminist campaign against the housewife has ignored crucial evidence about what makes women happy. Tooley calls for a new approach to the education of girls and boys.

The details of this approach are pretty undeveloped: free educational institutions from the fetters of the Sex Discrimination Act; stop insisting that boys and girls must study the same range of subjects; stop fretting about why there aren't more girls doing science and maths. I take it that the main practical implication would be to drop the requirement for all pupils up to 16 to study maths, English and science: not an obviously desirable outcome, but also too small a conclusion to justify a whole book.

Tooley's larger project is to halt the march of "equality feminism". If women value the private world of domesticity and motherhood, and men, public achievements in arts, literature, politics, philosophy and sport, then so be it. There's nothing wrong with gender stereotyping so long as each sex's choices are equally valued.

This is not a new debate. What's interesting is why we never get beyond it. In the Twenties, Eleanor Rathbone derided the "me-too" feminism that focused on getting women equal access to professions, and never noticed that most women's lives were dominated by motherhood. Lest Tooley recruit her, Rathbone was scathing about the inequalities visited on women in the distribution of family income and power, and shared none of his romanticism about men as protectors and providers.

In the Eighties, feminists revisited the relationship between public and private to develop radical proposals about patterns of employment that would enable both sexes to establish a better balance between parenting and work. The assumption of this last, of course, is that the unhappiness generated by having to "choose" between children and job is experienced by both sexes – and that the solutions lie in a more equitable division of both work and care.

Tooley is having none of this. Though he lauds the joys of domesticity, he is pretty clear from his own experience that it wouldn't be so fulfilling for men, and draws on speculative evolutionary psychology to demonstrate that the two sexes just want different things. Women everywhere devote more time to parenting than men. While Tooley notes a feminist narrative that links this to patriarchal power, he views it as a rather forlorn attempt to fend off universal "truths" about sexual difference.

One of his own examples of sexual difference – that men have better mathematical abilities while women are better with words – might be thought to present him with a problem. Why, then, don't women dominate the world of politics and write all the articles in this paper? The answer, he suggests, lies in the "findings" of evolutionary psychology about sexual selection. Women had to develop discerning linguistic abilities to discriminate between potential mates, but men had to use verbal skills more frequently in order to demonstrate superiority over competing men. There we have it: girls have superior verbal abilities but are less inclined to engage in public verbal displays; men get the top jobs in maths and in politics too.

For my part, I'd rather stick with the alternative feminist narrative that deals in categories of exclusion, inequality and power. This too has speculative elements, but at least has the benefit of fitting with documented events.

Tooley is probably right that young women are drinking too much chardonnay, and no doubt right that many are unhappy. But the problems facing women can hardly be explained by the successes of a feminist campaign against the housewife. We live in a workaholic society that conscripts men and women alike into longer hours of employment than most of them would choose, and prices decent accommodation beyond the reach of most households with a single earner. In this context, young women would be ill-advised to give up on their education or rely on a male provider to sustain them in their domestic joys.

Anne Phillips works in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics