The housewife is an unpaid worker in her husband's house in return for the security of being a permanent employee: hers is the reductio ad absurdum of the employee who accepts a lower wage in return for permanence of his employment. But the lowest paid employees can be and are laid off, and so are wives. They have no savings, no skills which they can bargain with elsewhere, and they must bear the stigma of having been sacked.

I'm not pretending I can give advice to every single person or every single couple for every situation; I'm making the point that we are not going to get to equality in the workforce before we get to equality in the home. Not going to happen.

Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let's stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices.

Women have much to tell us. Women are capable of seeing things in a different angle. Women can pose questions that we men cannot understand.

In the past a man was expected to give his seat on a bus to a woman. Today it would be much more courteous for that man to give her his job.

Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.