Viviane Reding and Marlene Mizzi, in a recent hagiographical elogium for “gender equality” promptly printed by Times of Malta, proudly announce that “women make up 60 per cent of university graduates in the EU”. How come nobody is questioning why a ‘movement’ which so ostensibly espouses ‘gender equality’ would see nothing egregious in this imbalance in university graduates?

This is a worrying trend in Europe and the US which few proponents of ‘gender equality’ seem willing to address. In Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys written back in 2000, the numbers of male graduates were already taking a nosedive and had been for many years before that. In her book Men On Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream, Helen Smith proposes that many boys have given up on college because it is a “feminist paradise” and “a finishing school for women” which gives prominence to the interests of women with nary a thought for those of their male counterparts.

It seems to me that women’s groups follow something of a double standard. When women lag behind men, that is a horrifying injustice that must be aggressively publicised and lobbied against. But when men lag behind women, that is a triumph of equality to be celebrated. No wonder most women in the western hemisphere are growing up with such an unwarranted sense of entitlement.